We often say, as we said last week, that this blog is not designed to do plaintiffs’ work for them. Thus, we are a heckuva lot more likely to trumpet pro-defense rulings than wrong ones. Still, it is important to know the problem areas out there, and today’s case displays one of them. It
When we see a case title with the same name on both sides of the v, we think of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the will contest described by Dickens in Bleak House. That fictional case dragged on for years and throughout the course of the book, ending only when legal expenses devoured all the
Don’t stop us if you’ve heard this before, because you have. A plaintiff brings an lawsuit over injuries allegedly from a medical device, sues not only the company that made and marketed the device but also a parent company that did not make or market the device, said parent moves for dismissal for want
California courts continue to find ways to exercise personal jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants, even when there is little or no dispute that the Constitution and the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court do not permit it. “Resistance” is probably too strong a word, insofar as it calls up images
Today’s post looks at a case where a defendant was in the wrong place. You might say the same thing about us. As you read this, we are on summer holiday. Because our vacation almost always takes place, as it does this year, during the Drug and Device Son’s birthday, he has veto power over
Last week business took us to South Florida. Thank you business, as it was 50 degrees warmer in Miami than it was in our frigid Philly suburb. We always love the Sunshine State, but we especially love it in January and February. We love it, even though Florida is the target of many barbs about
A federal court in Utah ruled the other day that it had no personal jurisdiction over a corporate parent, even though the plaintiffs alleged that the defendant subsidiary was the “alter ego” of its owner. We read the order with great interest for a couple of reasons. First, one of our first assignments out of
Not so long ago the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas emitted a malodorous opinion exercising personal jurisdiction over a foreign corporation because one of its materials suppliers was in Pennsylvania, even though the quality of that supplied material seemed to have nothing much to do with the injury, which occurred outside Pennsylvania. That opinion seems
A case from Alabama this week got us to thinking about two topics on which we write a lot — innovator liability and personal jurisdiction. We thought the most interesting part of Bexis’ recent post on innovator liability was its suggestion that innovators sued over the use of generic drugs should consider objecting to jurisdiction.
We have written a lot about personal jurisdiction and class actions, and we have particularly questioned how, after BMS, anyone could proceed with a nationwide class action applying state law in a forum where there is no general personal jurisdiction over the defendant. We are not the only ones posing this question, but as