Happy birthday, Christopher Plummer. The great Canadian actor turns 88 today, and seems as vibrant as ever. What a marvelous career Plummer has had. He is a preeminent Shakespearean actor. We saw him play Iago to James Earl Jones’s Othello on Broadway 35 years ago. Of course, most people remember Plummer as Captain Von Trapp
We harbor a suspicion that half the drug/device tort cases we encounter are really medical malpractice cases in search of a deeper pocket (thank you medmal damage cap statutes). We’ve said before (e.g., https://www.druganddevicelawblog.com/2008/10/everything-you-need-to-know-about-wyeth.html) that both Levine and Riegel were really med-mal cases. That search for a deeper pocket is undertaken by the lawyer,
We’ve made no secret of our dislike of the so called “heeding presumption.” We have a tag on this subject with multiple posts decrying this presumption — that juries may presume that if an alternative adequate warning had been given, it would have been heeded by the plaintiff (or, in prescription medical product cases, the
We’ve posted a lot about Plavix recently but all in the context of the Supreme Court’s decision in BMS v. Superior Court on personal jurisdiction. So, we don’t blame you if you forgot that the product at issue in that case was Plavix. The product wasn’t really at the heart of the analysis. Neither the
May 10 is an important day in the history of the law. On this date, way back in 1893, the Supreme Court ruled that the tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit. The case was called Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893). The issue concerned application of the Tariff Act of 1883, which
However a drug/device product liability is styled, it will almost always be focused on a claim of failure to warn. Why do plaintiffs insist on inserting a cause of action for manufacturing liability when there is not a whiff of evidence that anything went wrong on the production line? Seldom do we see the
The recent decision of the New York Court of Appeals in In re New York City Asbestos Litigation, ___ N.E.3d ___, 2016 WL 3495191 (N.Y. June 28, 2016) (“NYCAL”), was not too good for asbestos defendants – as it permitted, under certain circumstances, non-manufacturers to be sued for failure to warn of a risk that the product they manufactured didn’t have (exposure to asbestos), where they “encourage[ed]” the use of products containing that risk with their products and thereby benefitted economically:
[A] manufacturer’s duty to warn of combined use of its product with another product depends in part on whether the manufacturer’s product can function without the other product, as it would be unfair to allow a manufacturer to avoid the minimal cost of including a warning about the perils of the joint use of the products when the manufacturer knows that the combined use is both necessary and dangerous. And, the justification for a duty to warn becomes particularly strong if the manufacturer intends that customers engage in the hazardous combined use of the products at issue.
* * * *
[W]here a manufacturer creates a product that cannot be used without another product as a result of the design of the product, the mechanics of the product or the absence of economically feasible alternative means of enabling the product to function as intended, the manufacturer has a substantial, albeit indirect, role in placing the third-party product in the stream of commerce. . . . Specifically, when the manufacturer produces a product that requires another product to function, the manufacturer naturally opens up a profitable market for that essential component, thereby encouraging the other company to make that related product and place it in the stream of commerce.
NYCAL, 2016 WL 3495191, at *__ (for some reason there is no Westlaw star paging at the moment). This opinion is very bad news for the affected companies, who are now sucked into the maw of interminable asbestos litigation on the basis of products they didn’t even make, but it should not open the door to innovator liability type claims against our medical product manufacturer clients, and it’s good on causation, too.
Here’s why.Continue Reading New York Decision Not Good For Asbestos, But Not Bad For Drug/Device
This post comes from the Cozen O’Connor side of the blog.
Last week, the New York Appellate Division upheld a preemption decision in a medical device case involving alleged off-label promotion. Pitkow v. Lautin, 2016 WL 2746469 (N.Y. App. Div. May 12, 2016). While the Appellate Division’s opinion was only three-paragraphs long, it affirmed the trial court’s ruling in every respect, making the trial court’s lengthier opinion that much more important. We obtained a copy, and here it is.
The plaintiff’s claims were based on complications that arose after her use of an injectable product, Sculptra, for cosmetic purposes, which was an off-label use. Plaintiff sued the doctors who injected her and the manufacturers of Sculptra. Among other things, she alleged that the manufacturers had improperly promoted off-label use of Sculptra.
After discovery, the manufacturers moved for summary judgment, arguing that all of plaintiff’s claims were preempted. The trial court agreed and, quite effectively, walked through the manner in which both Riegel and Buckman preempted plaintiff’s claims as well as the deficiencies of plaintiff’s attempts at parallel violation claims.
First up was Riegel preemption, since Sculptra was approved under the FDA’s PMA process:
Sculptra is a Class III medical device that was undeniably approved through the PMA process. What is more, all of the plaintiff’s claims against the [manufacturers] regard the safety and effectiveness of the device or require a finding that Sculptra’s design, labeling, and/or manufacturing process should have differed from that approved by the FDA via the PMA process . . . . Thus, the claims are preempted by the federal law.
Slip. Op. at 8-9.Continue Reading New York Appellate Division Rejects Parallel Violation Claims Based on Off-Label Promotion
In third party payor litigation over prescription medical products, we have often marveled at the causation arguments that plaintiffs have offered and the willingness of some courts to accept collective proof over what really should involve individualized proof. Like here, here and here. (This same dynamic plays out when governmental entities seek reimbursement for such products too.) Usually, though, the plaintiffs allege that the manufacturer’s fraud—under whatever particular statutes or headings it is pursued—was unknown to them during the time for which they seek damages for amounts paid for the product and that the damages stopped once they found out. In Teamsters Local 237 Welfare Fund v. Astrazeneca Pharms. LP, No. 415, 2015, 2016 Del. LEXIS 236 (Del. Apr. 12, 2016), the plaintiff payors were undone by their concession that they knew about the alleged fraud and kept paying for the drug at issue anyway. Based on its self-described common sense analysis, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal for lack of causation without weighing in on the Superior Court’s rejection of causation where individual physicians made individual decisions about what to prescribe. This is a good result, but we are concerned about the implications for the practices of payors who seem increasingly interested in signing up with contingency fee lawyers to sue medical product manufacturers. (In case you were wondering, that was a teaser, designed to get you to read all the way to the end of the post.)
The basic facts are that the plaintiff filed a purported nationwide class action on behalf of third-party payors in Delaware state court in 2004, alleging that the defendant violated state consumer fraud laws by falsely marketing Nexium as being more effective than Prilosec, an older product with allegedly one-half of the same active ingredient per dose. Adding some facts omitted in the opinion, the initial NDA for Prilosec had been approved in 1989 (under the name Losec) and lost exclusivity in 2001, around which time FDA approved the NDA for Nexium, which had an enantiomer (here, the left hand chiral image) of the Prilosec’s active ingredient as its active ingredient. The indications for both drugs were expanded through the years, with Prilosec going over-the-counter in 2015. These drugs together accounted for a large chunk of the prescriptions written for heartburn, gastroesophageal reflux disease, and related complaints. Plaintiffs claimed that the development of Nexium and the marketing campaign after its introduction were designed to get the defendant paid a high price for its newer branded product instead of money going to pay for cheaper generic versions of the older product. They claimed they had been harmed by paying for the Nexium prescribed by physicians for the patients participating in their plans. The same group of lawyers apparently filed other “essentially identical class actions” with different sets of named plaintiffs, including one in Delaware federal court that resulted in the dismissal of a New York consumer fraud claim. Ignoring some history and details much like the plaintiffs ignored the marketing for Prilosec over the last fifteen years and the difference between a racemic mixture and an enantiomer, the Delaware state court action woke up from a long slumber in 2014 with its second amended complaint asserting the same claims the federal court had disposed of a few years before.
The Superior Court first determined that the law of New York, where the named plaintiffs were based, applied instead of the law of Delaware, where the defendant was based, or the laws of thirteen other states. Id. at *9. The court found that plaintiffs had not alleged the causation required for a consumer fraud claim: the “purported chain of causation that runs from the allegedly deceptive advertisements that may have influenced the decisions of individual doctors to prescribe a drug to their patients to causally affect the payer unions in this case is simply too attenuated,” as the doctors would be “presumed to go beyond advertising medium and use their independent knowledge in making medical decisions.” Id. at **9-10. We certainly like this reasoning, which would apply to a bunch of these cases. We also like that the court did not give plaintiffs a fourth chance to frame a complaint that stated a claim.Continue Reading TPPs Fail to Put Their Money Where Their (Litigation) Mouth Is and Lose
Every now and then even Bexis comes across a decision involving legal propositions he’d never heard of before. Such was the human tissue case Kennedy-McInnis v. Biomedical Tissue Services, Ltd., No. 13-CV-6545, slip op. (W.D.N.Y. April 12, 2016). Kennedy-McInnis introduced us to the common-law “right of sepulcher” – and more importantly to the defenses, including broad “good faith “ immunity, that limit this little known “right.”
First, why should anybody interested in drug/device product liability care? The answer is that a lot of products, particularly implantable medical devices, are used in conjunction with so-called “allograft bone.” As everyone knows, many other types of tissue are transplanted as well. Other medical devices, and some drugs, are typically used in conjunction with – or to support transplants of – various types of human tissue that doctors and hospitals typically obtain from tissue banks. Human tissue used in this manner can be extremely medically beneficial – and anything so beneficial is potentially worth a great deal.
Anything that’s worth a great deal creates a market for itself, and in our market-based society, there is always temptation for somebody in the chain of distribution to cut corners. When that happens, we’ve seen product manufacturers end up getting sued. Thus, we have blogged several times about litigation involving human tissue incorporated into certain medical devices, and allegations that fly-by-night (and convicted) intermediaries hadn’t bothered testing the tissue in question for communicable diseases. Ultimately, the litigation fizzled because, as bad as the intermediaries’ conduct had been, plaintiffs couldn’t prove that it actually caused anybody to get sick.Continue Reading Learning Something New – Limits To Human Tissue Liability