The late chef and travel raconteur Anthony Bourdain said that great chefs pride themselves on what they can do with offal. Anybody can make a fine steak. It takes real creativity and skill to turn glands and guts into something delectable. Think of sweetbreads, tripe, or liver. No, really. A couple of weeks ago on
We were talking the other day with a colleague with whom we have been in the mass tort trenches for most of the last 20 years, and she observed that “it’s not about the tort anymore.” Well, it is, and it isn’t. We still see cases, sometimes in very large numbers, involving drugs and medical
Back in the early days of the blog, when it was a Bexis/Herrmann operation, we wrote about the California Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to all that food litigation that now plagues that state − Farm Raised Salmon Cases, 175 P.3d 1170 (Cal. 2008). We explained how the court In Farm Raised
We continue to scratch our heads over consumer class actions seeking monetary compensation when the customers received exactly what they paid for. We see them from time to time in the pharmaceutical space, where patients claim monetary compensation even though the prescription drugs they used worked like they were supposed to with no adverse reactions.
We’ve always hated the concept of cy pres class action settlements. A cy pres distribution is an admission that, even without opposition, the plaintiffs cannot prove who was injured and by how much. Cy pres also takes money supposedly belonging to the injured class and give it to charities not injured by anyone, so the
We sometimes sit around trading stories about the dumbest lawsuits we have ever seen. Our personal favorite is a class action that the Drug and Device Law Spouse defended years ago seeking damages against a national shipping company because items sent by “Second Day Air” did not always go in an airplane. The packages arrived
If clients get sued by someone where physical or financial injury seems remote, unclear, or speculative, consider raising the defense of lack of standing. Courts are for resolving actual disputes among parties. As we said a little more than a month ago in another post on standing, courts are not debate halls. The standing
We recently read an editorial in The New York Times advocating lawsuits as a means of regulating an industry. Politicians are gripped by paralysis – so the argument goes – thus we must entrust the issue to litigators, smart judges, and good-hearted jurors. After all, hadn’t years of product liability litigation resulted in safer
Class actions hold our interest, even though we do not see them all that often anymore in the drug and medical device space. Maybe we are the rubbernecking motorists who can’t resist slowing down to gaze at someone else’s fender bender. Maybe we are the children at the zoo who rush to the reptile house
Just two days ago, Bexis lowered the boom on the Third Circuit’s recent decision in Cottrell v. Alcon Labs, ___ F.3d ___, 2017 WL 4657402 (3d Cir. Oct. 18, 2017). In a 2-1 decision, the Cottrell court permitted the plaintiffs to proceed on the notion that making eye drop drips bigger than they have