Given the events of the last eleven months or so, we give ourselves and other legal commentators a preemptive pass for the following situation: you read a case, you think about how you would describe it, and you see that you have described similar cases in a similar way more than once. This could be
As 2020 ended, our loyal readers joined us in reviewing our worst decisions of the past year – true superspreaders of litigation against our clients – and our best decisions of the past year, which we termed “tort pandemic countermeasures.”
As we do each year, we’re pleased to announce that four of your bloggers
Albert Einstein supposedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He may not have, but the point is well taken. We often think the same thing – particularly about plaintiffs that sue manufacturers of FDA premarket-approved (“PMA”) medical devices with vague, boilerplate complaints. Haven’t they heard about
Plaintiffs tend to assert a bunch of different claims. For prescription medical device cases, setting aside preemption, our experience is that plaintiffs do best—that is, avoid summary judgment and directed verdict—with design defect (strict liability or negligence) claims. One reason for that is that it tends not to be hard to make up some theory,
Most of the controversy in the recent decision, Hill v. Bayer Corp., 2020 WL 5367334 (E.D. Mich. Sept. 8, 2020), revolved around whether the plaintiff could assert a cause of action for failure to report adverse product events to the FDA. Like the great majority of decisions (particularly since Conklin v. Medtronic, Inc.,
Defendant manufacturers of FDA-approved Class III medical devices generally do pretty well with preemption motions, as our PMA Preemption Score Card (now with well over 500 decisions) demonstrates. Conley v. St. Jude Medical, LLC, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2020 WL 5087889 (M.D. Pa. Aug. 28, 2020), is one of these, but some aspects of
This post is a little different. Several of my colleagues – Reed Smith attorneys Robert J. Hill, Joseph W. Metro, Kevin M. Madagan, Andrew Y. Lu, Sung W. Park, Janine R. Tougas – wrote a client alert on the four recent executive orders that concerned pharmaceutical pricing. We had
Not long ago, an EPL (evil plaintiff lawyer) relayed to us that, based on reading our posts, another EPL had assumed we had a particular political view. As we laughed at the notion, we pondered the issues of assumption and incomplete information. Much like the old quip about what happens when you assume, many assumptions
People have long been fascinated by robots. Way before the term was coined in a 1920 play or Isaac Asimov popularized it, there were stories about machines that acted like living things. The droids of Star Wars universe are famed for the likeability and pluck. However, there is still the specter that some of those
Today we bring you the DDL blog version of the “duck test.” The “duck test” goes like this – if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. When you see a duck swimming in a pond, you don’t normally say: “hey, look