If the pelvic mesh litigation ever ends, the tongue of history will tell a tale of specious plaintiff theories that hoodwinked judges and juries into condemning good products. Plaintiffs extracted millions of dollars and erased product lines by cobbling together irrelevant workplace material handling sheets, counterfactual stories in which the FDA does not exist, and
Get a group of experienced lawyers together and it won’t be long before there is a one-upsmanship game of Crazy-Things-Judges-Have-Done. A learned and revered colleague tells the story of how he went to argue before a law and motion judge many years ago and low comedy ensued. Being a diligent sort of fellow, said learned
This will be the last post we write for a while, as we are about to head to trial in a product liability case. The plaintiff says that a medical device has caused her to suffer pain and other injuries. What else would you expect? Her case has gotten as far as it has because
We don’t know much, but there are a few things we know for sure. One is that when a topic is complex and not within the knowledge of an ordinary lay person, you generally need an expert. A second is that determining the medical cause of a disease is almost always complex and not within
The Ninth Circuit has not been great for us on Daubert. I suppose it is more accurate to say that the Ninth Circuit has not been great for those who oppose the introduction of unreliable scientific expert opinions. But that is usually us, the defendants resisting plaintiffs’ efforts to get to juries with scientific
Last week we praised the S.D Indiana court’s Daubert decision in the Cook IVC filters litigation. Apparently the court is an expert on experts, because it came out with another sensible decision on experts, this time on the use of treating physicians to offer causation opinions. In re Cook Medical IVC Filters Mktg., Sales Practices
The Nebraska Supreme Court issued a gem of a Daubert opinion in an Accutane case last week, Freeman v. Hoffman-La Roche, Inc., No. S-17-800, 2018 WL 2296772, at *2 (Neb. May 18, 2018). We don’t write much about Nebraska, but the last time we waxed on about the beauty of the Platte River Valley,
Last week at the DRI conference in New York an especially talented lawyer delivered an especially interesting address. Everything about the speech was riveting and splendid, until she deployed the word “fulsome” in the increasingly popular, albeit wrong, fashion, as a synonym for full or complete. About twenty heads spun around to look at us
Class actions hold our interest, even though we do not see them all that often anymore in the drug and medical device space. Maybe we are the rubbernecking motorists who can’t resist slowing down to gaze at someone else’s fender bender. Maybe we are the children at the zoo who rush to the reptile house
This year’s Academy Award nominations came out last week. That means that we have spent the past few days setting a schedule for seeing all of the Best Picture nominees (well, most – we don’t do war movies and tend to opt out of love stories involving semi-animate objects) and scouring recipe blogs for perfect