This is only from the Reed Smith side of the blog
We’ve just received today’s decision by the Supreme Court of Iowa in Huck v. Wyeth, Inc., No 12-0596, slip op. (Iowa July 11, 2014). It’s 48 pages long (with a 1-justice concurrence and a 3-justice dissent). It addresses both generic preemption and innovator
This post is from the Reed Smith side of the blog only – the Dechert lawyers were not involved.
The Iowa Court of Appeals has affirmed summary judgment entered in favor of both branded and generic manufacturers of metoclopramide, looking at Mensing’s effect on both in the process. In Huck v. Trimark Physicians Group,
We wrote yesterday about how common sense had gone missing from the Southern District of Illinois. But common sense is like the Dow Jones index – some days it is down 1,000 points in a few minutes, other days it is up 400 points. Today we’re bullish. Specifically, we are happy to report about a
Years ago we were often entertained by the comedic stylings of “Professor” Irwin Corey, “World’s Foremost Authority.” Authority in what? (Or so we imagine you asking.) Well, that’s the point. He was an authority on everything and nothing. His shtick was to amble on stage dressed in a collegiate gown and sneakers, and then hold forth on a variety of topics via double-talk, stream-of-consciousness, and abrupt, nonsensical topic changes. Here’s an odd bit of high-brow/low-brow trivia: Ayn Rand was a big fan of Professor Corey.
For some reason, we think of Irwin Corey when we confront plaintiff expert witnesses in drug or device cases. Plaintiff lawyers are nothing if not cheap, so they like to use the same experts again and again to cover a broad swath of scientific and technical areas, even if those areas are far away from the witness’s training and practice. More often than not, they (the plaintiff lawyers and the instant “experts”) get away with it. We remember deposing a professor of marketing who not only uttered the most inane thoughts on how certain advertisements contained Freudian themes, but also took a few stray shots at cancer causation. Like any semi-awake lawyer, we asked the witness whether he considered himself an oncologist. The witness than said something like, “I’m not board-certified as a medical doctor, but I think that I have had education, experience, and training that would permit me to share a few things that would be helpful to the jury.” And then he grinned. He grinned because he knew he had played the game well.
Too many courts let plaintiff experts play the game. Courts are supposed to act as gate-keepers. Gate-keeping must be plenty hard, because more than a few judges seem inclined to let phony experts blather. The judges would rather have the jurors sort it all out. It’s possible that we are irretrievably scarred on this issue, since we practice in a jurisdiction where a witness is qualified to testify as an expert if the witness “has any reasonable pretension to specialized knowledge on the subject under investigation.” Miller v. Brass Rail Tavern, Inc., 541 Pa. 474, 480-81 (1995). That’s right, “pretension.”Continue Reading World’s Foremost Authority