This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog only.
Mismatch your socks – you’re bold. Mismatch your shoes – you’re frazzled. Mismatch plates on a dining table – your creating ambience. Mismatch your pizza with pineapple – well don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Treat the law like it’s your socks
Developments in the Rouviere v. DePuy litigation have already produced two of our blogposts. Rouviere v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 471 F. Supp.3d 571 (S.D.N.Y. 2020), which we discussed here, produced one of the first major decisions of the COVID-19 pandemic on remote depositions as the “new normal.” Then, Rouviere v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc.
We are feeling happy and grateful this week. On Sunday, we were able to hug the Drug and Device Law Dowager Countess for the first time in fourteen months and to share a Mothers’ Day meal with her and our siblings, all fully vaccinated and past the waiting period. The Countess is closer to 90
We understand the value of branching out and trying new things. Recently, a close companion prevailed upon us to try calamari (thumbs down). We signed up for a Zoom acting class during the pandemic. And we are seriously considering a “new” hair color, to take advantage of the natural phenomenon that has occurred during the
The district judge in the In re Zimmer Nexgen Knee Implant Products Liability Litigation MDL issued a summary judgment order in October 2016 that we called “the best Wisconsin law decision we have ever seen.” What was the reason for our unusually unbridled enthusiasm? The district judge debunked the idea that the learned
We don’t often get to discuss decisions from Maine. In fact, a quick spin through the blog and you’ll see Maine really only comes up in various canvases or surveys of state law. We don’t dislike the state. We love the lobster — that they take very seriously. We can’t say we love the winters
We’ve made no secret of our dislike of the so called “heeding presumption.” We have a tag on this subject with multiple posts decrying this presumption — that juries may presume that if an alternative adequate warning had been given, it would have been heeded by the plaintiff (or, in prescription medical product cases, the
Devoted as we are to the defense of manufacturers of prescription drugs and medical devices, we have often advocated for the full implication of the fundamental—to us, at least—requirements that warnings claims focus on the decision making of the learned intermediary and that proximate cause matters. One implication is that heeding presumptions typically make little sense for claims about these products. It is one thing to say that a plaintiff should be allowed to proceed with a warnings claim when a prescriber is truly unavailable to provide testimony—like by dying before the plaintiff knew he had a claim—and the alleged missing warning would have clearly contraindicated the plaintiff from receiving the prescription product. In such a case, it might make sense to presume, absent contrary evidence, that the physician would have heeded the warning and not prescribed the product to the plaintiff. In just about every other prescription drug and device case we can imagine, the heeding presumption does not make sense.
We feel the same way about a post-sale duty to warn. Not only do such duties run contrary to the typical focus in warnings cases on the notice to the manufacturer of potential risks before the product leaves its control (or is prescribed to plaintiff), but the proximate cause inquiry can quickly become an exercise in layered speculation. Cases acknowledging such a post-sale duty have typically involved situations where the seller had a continuing relationship with the purchaser, with an obvious route for relaying additional information about the product in a way that allows a jury to evaluate whether injury would have been avoided. In prescription drug and device cases, there tends not to be any direct relationship at any time and the manufacturer does not know the names or addresses of patients using its products. Over time, patients move, change their physicians, and even see physicians for reasons unrelated to the reason they were prescribed a drug or device in the past. Over time, manufacturers also stop selling specific products or product lines and may even go out of business. When it comes to drugs with alleged remote effects or devices that are implanted for many years, these real world considerations make potentially unlimited post-sale duties to warn a folly. We could go on, but we will not.Continue Reading Heeding Presumption Only Goes So Far In Post-Sale Warning Case
The recent decision of the New York Court of Appeals in In re New York City Asbestos Litigation, ___ N.E.3d ___, 2016 WL 3495191 (N.Y. June 28, 2016) (“NYCAL”), was not too good for asbestos defendants – as it permitted, under certain circumstances, non-manufacturers to be sued for failure to warn of a risk that the product they manufactured didn’t have (exposure to asbestos), where they “encourage[ed]” the use of products containing that risk with their products and thereby benefitted economically:
[A] manufacturer’s duty to warn of combined use of its product with another product depends in part on whether the manufacturer’s product can function without the other product, as it would be unfair to allow a manufacturer to avoid the minimal cost of including a warning about the perils of the joint use of the products when the manufacturer knows that the combined use is both necessary and dangerous. And, the justification for a duty to warn becomes particularly strong if the manufacturer intends that customers engage in the hazardous combined use of the products at issue.
* * * *
[W]here a manufacturer creates a product that cannot be used without another product as a result of the design of the product, the mechanics of the product or the absence of economically feasible alternative means of enabling the product to function as intended, the manufacturer has a substantial, albeit indirect, role in placing the third-party product in the stream of commerce. . . . Specifically, when the manufacturer produces a product that requires another product to function, the manufacturer naturally opens up a profitable market for that essential component, thereby encouraging the other company to make that related product and place it in the stream of commerce.
NYCAL, 2016 WL 3495191, at *__ (for some reason there is no Westlaw star paging at the moment). This opinion is very bad news for the affected companies, who are now sucked into the maw of interminable asbestos litigation on the basis of products they didn’t even make, but it should not open the door to innovator liability type claims against our medical product manufacturer clients, and it’s good on causation, too.
Here’s why.Continue Reading New York Decision Not Good For Asbestos, But Not Bad For Drug/Device
Ever since this blog started, we’ve made plain that we have no use for the so-called “heeding presumption.” This presumption posits that, because under Restatement §402A, comment j, a defendant providing an adequate warning can presume it will be heeded, a plaintiff should also be able to presume that an adequate warning, had it been granted, would have been heeded. That’s false equivalence if we’ve ever seen it. A defendant to such a warning claim needs no heeding presumption, since it wins on adequacy without ever getting to causation. The comment j discussion really involves design defects (about which more below). Plaintiffs, on the other hand, are getting a burden of proof shift on warning causation that simply has no basis in reality. People disregard adequate warnings all the time.
So we fight the heeding presumption whenever it comes up. Some states have good law on the issue. N.C. G.S.A. §99B-5(a); Wis. Stat. §895.047(1)(e); Ford Motor Co. v. Boomer, 736 S.E.2d 724, 733 (Va. 2013); Rivera v. Philip Morris, Inc., 209 P.3d 271, 274 (Nev. 2009); Leaf v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 590 N.W.2d 525, 528-29 (Iowa 1999); Riley v. American Honda Motor Co., 856 P.2d 196, 199-200 (Mont. 1993); Deere & Co. v. Grose, 586 So. 2d 196, 198 (Ala. 1991); Huitt v. Southern California Gas Co., 116 Cal. Rptr.3d 453, 467-68 (Cal. App. 2010); Harris v. International Truck & Engine Corp., 912 So. 2d 1101, 1109 (Miss. App. 2005); McPike v. Enciso’s Cocina Mejicana, Inc., 762 P.2d 315, 319 (Or. App. 1988); DeJesus v. Craftsman Machinery Co., 548 A.2d 736 (Conn. App. 1988); Muilenberg v. Upjohn Co., 320 N.W.2d 358, 366 (Mich. App. 1982); Potthoff v. Alms, 583 P.2d 309, 311 (Colo. App. 1978); Payne v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., 767 F.3d 526 (6th Cir. 2014) (applying Tennessee law); Tuttle v. Lorillard Tobacco Co., 377 F.3d 917, 925 (8th Cir. 2004) (applying Minnesota law); Wilson v. Bradlees of New England, Inc., 250 F.3d 10 (1st Cir. 2001) (applying New Hampshire law); Christopher v. Cutter Laboratories, 53 F.3d 1184, 1192-93 (11th Cir. 1995) (applying Florida law); Odom v. G.D. Searle & Co., 979 F.2d 1001, 1003 (4th Cir. 1992) (applying South Carolina law); Muzichuck v. Forest Laboratories, Inc., 2015 WL 235226, at *13 (N.D.W. Va. Jan. 16, 2015); Luttrell v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., 894 F. Supp.2d 1324, 1345 n.16 (E.D. Wash. 2012).
Almost as many states are adverse. House v. Armour, Inc., 929 P.2d 340, 347 (Utah 1996); Coffman v. Keene Corp., 628 A.2d 710, 717-19 (N.J. 1993); Eagle-Picher Industries, Inc. v. Balbos, 604 A.2d 445, 468-69 (Md. 1992); Bushong v. Garman Co., 843 S.W.2d 807, 811 (Ark. 1992); Arnold v. Ingersoll-Rand Co., 834 S.W.2d 192, 194 (Mo. 1992); Butz v. Werner, 438 N.W.2d 509, 517 (N.D. 1989); Harlow v. Chin, 545 N.E.2d 602, 606 (Mass. 1989); Bloxom v. Bloxom, 512 So.2d 839, 850 (La. 1987); Payne v. Soft Sheen Products, Inc., 486 A.2d 712, 725 (D.C. 1985); Wooderson v. Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp., 681 P.2d 1038, 1057-58 (Kan. 1984); Seley v. G.D. Searle Co., 423 N.E.2d 831, 838 (Ohio 1981); Menard v. Newhall, 373 A.2d 505, 506 (Vt. 1977); Cunningham v. Charles Pfizer & Co., 532 P.2d 1377, 1382 (Okla. 1974); Dole Food Co. v. North Carolina Foam Industries, Inc., 935 P.2d 876, 883 (Ariz. App. 1996); Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp. v. Chapman, 388 N.E.2d 541, 555 (Ind. App. 1979).Continue Reading Heedless Heeding Presumptions – How New York Law Became a Morass