We have spilled a lot of blog ink on Federal Rule of Evidence 702 recently, so it was nice to see a case from our home state of California driving home the importance of following the rules when it comes to expert opinions. California has a reputation for allowing expert opinions into evidence more permissively
“To be clear, while an association between acetaminophen and autism has been described in many studies, a causal relationship has not been established . . . .” That is not your DDL bloggers speaking (although we did add the emphasis). It is not a drug manufacturer speaking, nor any particular doctor or researcher speaking. It
The MDL and state court proceedings involving saxagliptin-based diabetes drugs (such as Onglyza and Kombiglyze) strike us as the mass tort that never should have been. These proceedings initially followed a familiar model—a publication identified a signal of a risk (albeit an exceptionally weak signal), and plaintiffs’ lawyers took their cue to collect their inventories
We had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at ACI last week, including discussion of the terrific order from the Zantac MDL excluding all the plaintiffs’ general causation experts. That order essentially did away with an entire MDL and came in fourth on our list of best decisions of 2022 . Our thoroughly enjoyable
When you depose the other side’s expert, there’s always that string of questions where you collect the admissions of non-expertise. “You’re not an expert in x? You’re not an expert in y? You’re not an expert in z?” Etc. Sometimes the expert does some clever fencing. E.g., “What do you mean by expert?” Or worse
When we were small – ten or so – our father worked twenty miles from our home, in the town in which we now live. The town was – and is – a few miles from the Devon Horse Show, a world-famous affair held for eleven days each spring spanning Memorial Day Weekend. For one
The Incretin-Based Therapies MDL has followed a long and winding road, and it all should come to an end with a recent Ninth Circuit opinion affirming the exclusion of the plaintiffs’ only general causation expert. It all started in 2013 with the MDL transfer of cases involving multiple diabetes drugs to the Southern District of
The pelvic mesh remand hits just keep coming. We like Shostrom v. Ethicon, Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 55748 (D. Colorado March 28, 2022), because it hammers some ubiquitous plaintiff mesh experts and because it finds a way to depart from an awful MDL ruling. The fact that the opinion comes at the expense
If the concept behind Multidistrict Litigations is centralized, efficient management of common issues in large numbers of lawsuits, with remand of trial-ready cases, then MDLs are less than successful on those grounds, and certainly not successful enough to justify the asymmetric discovery and bad rulings (or nonrulings) that come as part and parcel of the
Pacira Biosciences, Inc. v. American Society of Anesthesiologists, Inc., 2022 WL 336585 (D. N.J. Feb. 4, 2022), is not a product liability opinion. Instead, it occurs in the context of a motion to dismiss a trade libel case brought by a pharmaceutical company. The Pacira court decided that the truth/falsity of scientific ideas published