It is not uncommon that terms are used without knowledge of their origin and that the origin is instructive about the meaning or proper application of the term. We offer two examples. Many lawyers who at least dabble in product liability litigation have heard the term “Bradford Hill criteria.” Was it named after two different
We learned about this 148-page decision late this afternoon. It’s very good from our defense-minded perspective, and one of the first, if not the first, expert evaluations to take place under newly amended Fed. R. Evid. 702. More to come, likely including a revision of our upcoming 2023 top ten blogpost, but we wanted our
We had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at ACI last week, including discussion of the terrific order from the Zantac MDL excluding all the plaintiffs’ general causation experts. That order essentially did away with an entire MDL and came in fourth on our list of best decisions of 2022 . Our thoroughly enjoyable
We’ve discussed our Drug and Device Law Blog elder care duties before and how it has educated us about health issues faced by the senior population. Shingles is one health risk that increases as you get older. It is often described as a painful rash, but “painful rash” doesn’t really capture how bad shingles can
Here is another guest post by Reed Smith‘s Kevin Hara examining the exclusion of a couple of slapdash expert witnesses, and the resultant grant of summary judgment. Since it is summer time, it is only fitting that he does so using baseball analogies. As always, our guest posters deserve 100% of the credit (and
Here’s a shocker: being a tv star doctor does not make one a viable expert under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. That’s not just our say-so (or ipse dixit). One of our reliance materials is Thelen v. Somatics, LLC, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 101970 (M.D. Fla. June 12, 2023). The plaintiff in that case
A little while ago, Bexis attended a Lawyers for Civil Justice semi-annual meeting, at which he received that organization’s “Outstanding Contributor Award” (in full disclosure, so did a half dozen other members). With the soon-to-be-adopted amendments to Fed. R. Evid. 702 having now been approved by the Supreme Court (with only the unlikely step of a congressional veto remaining), the question was what happens next.
These amendments expressly enshrine the expert “gatekeeper” function in the text of Rule 702. The next step is whether they can be duplicated – or paralleled − in state rules of evidence. We think that they can, and for a state (like Pennsylvania and a number of others) that still follows the “Frye” standard looking to the “general acceptance” of expert testimony as the touchstone to admissibility, a Rule 702 state-law equivalent might look something like this:
Continue Reading 50-State Survey of State Court Decisions Supporting Expert-Related Judicial Gatekeeping
Just last week we updated our discussion on the 2023 amendments to Rule 702 urging our readers to start using the amendments now before their official implementation in December. That’s because the Report of the Rules Advisory Committee confirms that the change to Rule 702 is to correct the mistakes of those courts who have
What follows is from the non-Dechert side of the Blog.
In the Zantac MDL, the plaintiffs’ causation problems were plainly visible on the horizon, as we mentioned in our post last year about the Zantac ruling on medical monitoring, In re Zantac (Ranitidine) Products Liability Litigation, 546 F. Supp.3d 1152 (S.D. Fla. 2021). The Zantac MDL plaintiffs’ claims regarding risk of injury and exposure levels to purported ranitidine-derived nitrosamines (“NDMA” for short) seemed not only trivial, but in many ways bizarre (use of extreme temperatures and other parameters). They even relied on a retracted study. That’s why we referred to the “wheels coming off” the plaintiffs’ scientific case in that post.
Now the plaintiffs’ wheels are fully off in Zantac MDL – as we mentioned before, all of their causation experts for the five types of cancer that plaintiffs themselves considered the most plausible have been excluded under F.R. Evid. 702, and summary judgment entered. In re Zantac (Ranitidine) Products Liability Litigation, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2022 WL 17480906 (S.D. Fla. Dec. 6, 2022). This is a lengthy opinion, 341 pages in slip form. To keep this post as short as possible, we’ll be summarizing (at best) large parts of it.
Continue Reading Zantac Chronicles – Concluding Chapters in the MDL
In a 341-page opinion, In re Zantac (Ranitidine) Products Liability Litigation, 9:20-md-02924-RLR, slip op. (S.D. Fla. Dec. 6, 2022), the MDL court held that all of the Zantac plaintiffs’ general causation experts (concerning five cancer types) failed to meet the admissibility standards of Fed. R. Evid. 702. Consequently the court granted the defendants’ motions
