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This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the Blog.

Breaking new ground, a court has for the first time held that the Medical Device Amendments to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act expressly preempt product-liability claims implicating a Class II medical device brought to market through the “de novo” classification process. This is

Last week, FDA released for comment a draft guidance titled Addressing Misinformation About Medical Devices and Prescription Drugs: Questions and Answers.  FDA guidances are nonbinding recommendations without force of law, and this is only a draft.  Nonetheless, it addresses a frequent and important problem in our industry.Continue Reading FDA Releases Draft Guidance on Responding to Internet Hogwash

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When we tell people what we do, we often get a response, from lawyers and non-lawyers alike, to the effect of, “so you do class actions.”  The somewhat canned response is that “serial product liability litigations” or “mass torts” rarely involve certified classes other than settlement classes because individual factors in personal injury cases almost

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Local counsel in one of our cases made it clear that unless we wanted to broadcast that we were from out of state, we needed to pronounce Oregon as “Or-gun” not “Or-ah-gone”, and we have tried to remember that tip ever since.  But today’s District of Oregon case, Glover v. Avanos Med., Inc., No.

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The FDA has taken recent steps that may, or may not, affect product liability litigation.  We’re discussing the “may” aspect.  For purely regulatory analysis, plenty of other commentary is available.

These actions occurred on September 7, 2023, and involve three “draft guidances” bearing on the “§510(k)” substantial equivalence clearance process for medical devices.  Any litigator with even passing knowledge of medical device preemption knows that this − more properly, a prior (1982) version − is the process that the Supreme Court stated, was “focused on equivalence, not safety” in Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr, 518 U.S. 470, 493 (1996) (emphasis original).Continue Reading Tort-Related Implications of Recent FDA Device Draft Guidances