Photo of Bexis

We haven’t yet said a peep about the FAS 5 brouhaha.
And, Lord knows, we haven’t had to.
In a nutshell, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has proposed to amend FASB Statement No. 5 to require companies to make additional disclosures about pending “loss contingencies,” which means making more public statements about pending litigation.
For

Photo of Bexis

We were pleased to see that Judge Breyer has entered a so-called “Lone Pine” order in the Celebrex multidistrict litigation. Here’s a link to the order.
Lone Pine was a New Jersey state court case in which the judge ordered plaintiffs to offer proof connecting the defendant’s product to the plaintiff’s alleged injury.

Photo of Bexis

Every once in a while, you’re asked to name the mass torts.
You typically start with asbestos and breast implants, and then stammer out a few more.
But one of us is now doing some work that requires focusing specifically on the drug and device mass torts, so — cleverly combining client work with blogging

Photo of Bexis

We’ll report here on one last thing that we heard at the ALI Mass Litigation conference in Charleston last month — because they are words that should be in the public domain.

A plaintiffs’ lawyer speaking at the conference said that MDL transferee judges create trouble when they appoint to the plaintiffs’ steering committee lawyers

Photo of Bexis

A couple of months ago, we spied the Supreme Court case of Taylor v. Sturgell as being one to watch. In the words of the Mass Tort Litigation Blog, “[t]he D.C. Circuit had held that a plaintiff was barred by claim preclusion from pursuing his FOIA claim because he was virtually represented by an earlier

Photo of Bexis

Ordinarily, a federal trial court cannot order that some other lawsuit in state court be stopped.

When federal courts preliminarily approve class action settlements, however, they often enjoin prosecution of competing cases that could interfere with the settlement. Federal courts issue those injunctions under the “in aid of jurisdiction” exception to the Anti-Injunction Act. See

Photo of Bexis

One of your dynamic blogging duo — we won’t say which one — strolled down the street recently to watch, on behalf of an interested client, the opening statements in a product liability trial.

The trial court had consolidated the claims of more than two dozen plaintiffs to be decided in this one trial. (The

Photo of Bexis

One panel at the Tulane MDL Symposium consisted of the triumvirate of Judges Mark Davidson, Carol Higbee, and Janis Jack.
Judge Davidson handles the Texas statewide asbestos proceedings; his was an interesting talk, but this blog doesn’t worry too much about asbestos. We learned two things of broader interest that we’ll share.
First, the chair

Photo of Bexis

Bexis’ firm represents Merck, so he was not involved in drafting this post. Pin the blame for what follows exclusively on Herrmann:
We were so busy ranting yesterday about that article on spine surgery in The New York Times that we nearly overlooked this little ditty from The Wall Street Journal. It reports that the