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Today’s case is not about drugs or medical devices.  It is about popcorn, a perfect prompt (or as good as ours ever get) for a rant about movies.  We are working our way through the Oscar nominees, in anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards.  (Pre-apocalypse, we hosted an annual Oscar party, featuring good food, good

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Product liability litigation over Class III medical devices is an interesting creature.  Absent something unusual, cases and litigations should not get past motions to dismiss.  That is pretty clearly what Congress intended when an express preemption provision was added to the Medical Device Amendments of 1976.  We understand that each plaintiff may think her case is exceptional in that it should meet the exception to the rule of preemption.  (We do not really think the plaintiff lawyers think that, although they sure argue it enough.)  But the usual is more common than the unusual by definition.  When you hear hoof beats, you should look for a horse not a zebra, unless you happen to be in a part of the world where zebras are endemic or end up in a zebra enclosure in a zoo.  When you hear Class III medical device product liability case, you should look for all claims to be dismissed unless there is something as unusual as a basis to claiming the plaintiff’s particular device deviated from its FDA-approved specifications.

In 2001, the Supreme Court made getting past motions to dismiss harder when it held in Buckman that plaintiffs could not recover claims predicated on violations of FDA regulations.  An unfortunate fiction developed post-Buckman—particularly after Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc. 552 U.S. 312 (2008)—that plaintiffs could assert “parallel claims” that were neither expressly preempted by the provisions of the MDA nor impliedly preempted under Buckman.  We, and others, have described the purported path of a parallel claim as being like navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, a monster and whirlpool on opposite sides of a narrow strait per ancient Greek mythology.  Without claiming that mythology is the same as fiction—we are not touching that with a twenty foot sarissa—we can say that a true parallel claim is as rare as a striped unicorn or perhaps a flying horse.  The unfortunate fiction of which we spoke above has taken shape with particularly egregious appellate decisions like Bausch such that some trial courts are advised, when they hear the hoof beat of a Class III medical device product liability case, to expect Pegasus or his stripy, horned pal to gallop around the corner.

Viewed over the course of more than five years and many decisions, three of which have featured in prior posts (here, here, and here, which drew honorable mention honors in 2018), we think Bausch delayed the inevitable in Gravitt v. Mentor Worldwide, LLC, __ F.Supp.3d __, 2022 WL 17668486 (N.D. Ill. Dec. 14, 2022), by insisting that parallel claims for failure to report adverse events to FDA exist.  After an unnecessary odyssey, the manufacturer of a Class III breast implant won summary judgment on the last of plaintiffs’ claims, alleged failure to report adverse events to FDA.  (We say “plaintiffs,” but the decision referred to the plaintiff with the implant—who we will call the “plaintiff”—by her first name and the consortium plaintiff by his first name.  In terms of whether the last claim was supported, the court referred the female plaintiff only and somehow omitted any reference to “burden.”  These are usually signs that at least one claim will survive summary judgment.)  A shout out to Dustin Rawlin and his colleagues for sticking it out on this case and sending us this decision.

Continue Reading Fallacious FDA Reporting Claim Finally Falls

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Drug manufacturers are not insurers against injury from or while taking medications.  Neither are distributors or pharmacies.  Just because a patient experiences a complication while taking a medication, including the very condition the medication is supposed to help prevent, does not mean that some person or entity should be liable to the patient for her injuries.  Sometimes, there is no fault or liability to be found.  We do not think these are controversial principles, but we find that they apply to more than a few of the cases giving rise to the decisions about which we expound.

We also find that missing facts from complaints can speak volumes.  Similarly, when a plaintiff waits until the third complaint to add case-specific factual allegations that should have been there from the start or when factual allegations pop in and out of serial amendments you have to question the basis for those allegations.  At least we do.  As inveterate curmudgeons, we tend to think bare-bones, boilerplate allegations are unlikely to be supported if the case gets to the merits.  Of course, part of the game for some plaintiffs is to get past pleadings and hope the defendants opt for settlement instead of paying the costs of defense.  The Twombly and Iqbal decisions tightened pleading standards, and thus improved the chance of success on motions to dismiss in federal court and some states have followed along.  The hole, and source of our periodic grumbling, is how often dismissals are without prejudice and accompanied by leave to amend.  Too often, it seems that the provision in Fed. R. Civ. P. 15 that courts “should freely give leave when justice so requires” leads to leave even when it should be obvious that amendment will be futile, not to mention a waste of judicial resources.

Continue Reading Five Strikes Needed To Dismiss A Questionable Case

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The case we discuss today, Vaughan v. Biomat USA, Inc., 2022 WL 4329094 (N.D. Ill. 2022), is neither a medical-device nor a pharmaceutical case. Nor is it a product-liability case. It is, however, a preemption case that implicates two issues relevant to our world.

The plaintiffs sold blood plasma to the defendants. When they

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Under Fed. R. Evid. 9(b), “[i]n alleging fraud or mistake, a party must state with particularity the circumstances constituting fraud or mistake.”  In our sphere, federal courts are quite variable in how they apply this standard when deciding 12(b)(6) motions.  In particular, MDLs seem to have an unfortunate habit of allowing general allegations to support

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Famous (and infamous) Illinois trial lawyer Clarence Darrow once said that he never wished a man dead, but had occasionally read some obituaries with great satisfaction.  (That same quote is sometimes incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain.) 


We’re no Darrow. We’ve never saved a client from capital punishment, or discredited a former presidential candidate in a

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A little over a year ago, the Supreme Court heard argument in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eight Judicial District Court, 141 S.Ct. 1017 (2021) regarding an issue of personal jurisdiction.  At that time, we tried our hand at reading the tea leaves and made this prediction about how the Ford Motor decision might adversely