When we first looked at the decision for today’s post, we thought about comparing it to fan fiction. If you aren’t familiar with the term it is fiction stories written about characters from an original work of fiction created by fans of the original work as opposed to its creator. Pretty straightforward in concept. But
This guest post is by Tom Hurney at Jackson Kelly, a genuine West Virginia lawyer who leaped at the opportunity to write about a recent favorable decision of his home state’s highest court and to give you a taste of what West Virginia is like. We were happy to oblige. So here’s a discussion
While the entire blogging team (RS, at least) was traveling home by planes, trains and automobiles from the DRI’s annual Drug and Medical Device conference, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals – yes, the same court that rejected the learned intermediary rule little more than a decade ago – issued its blockbuster opinion today
We remember how, shortly after the atrocious decision in Johnson & Johnson v. Karl, 647 S.E.2d 899 (W. Va. 2007), rejecting altogether the learned intermediary rule, litigation tourists visiting West Virginia argued that Karl represented that state’s “public policy” and therefore the learned intermediary rule could not apply even to their out-of-state cases under
What follows is a guest post from long-time friend of the blog Thomas J. Hurney, Jr. of Jackson Kelly PLLC in Charleston, West Virginia. Tom comes to us today with news of an interesting – and favorable – federal court remand denial in one of the recently filed opioid litigation in his state. It raises
We have two posts on innovator liability that we update on a consistent basis: our innovator liability scorecard, and our “Innovator Liability at 100” state-by-state collection of materials that we originally compiled when the one-hundredth judicial opinion on this topic was decided. Well, not too long ago the Fourth Circuit, in McNair
We don’t write a lot on the various pelvic mesh MDLs in West Virginia because we are so heavily involved in two of them. But the MDL court entered an order last week on design defect and alternative design that we consider to be a real gem. The case is Mullins v. Ethicon, Inc., No. 2:12-cv-02952, 2016 WL 7197441 (S.D. W. Va. Dec. 9, 2016), and we recommend it to all of you. We say that not only because the district court held that West Virginia law requires that each plaintiff must prove a feasible alternative design—which is the correct result—but also because the order is particularly well reasoned.
Not every state requires proof of a feasible alternative design, but it is nevertheless a basic product liability concept. It is a particularly good fit when dealing with products that always bear risks—such as implanted medical devices. The Restatement (Third) of Torts, Product Liability § 2 is as good a place as any to start, as it bakes alternative design right into the definition of a design defect: “A product . . . (b) is defective in design when the foreseeable risks of harm posed by the product could have been reduced or avoided by the adoption of a reasonable alternative design by the seller or other distributor, or a predecessor in the commercial chain of distribution, and the omission of the alternative design renders the product not reasonably safe.” (emphasis added).
Take the obvious example of a machine with sharp spinning parts. The same machine with a protective guard may be a safer alternative design. Or it might not. The point is that the plaintiff has to prove it. Take also the example we discussed in Bexis’ aptly named post “On Alternative Design.” That case involved hernia mesh, not pelvic mesh, and the plaintiffs’ claims failed because, among other reasons, they had failed to prove that a mesh of a different design would have been any safer. Consider hormone-based contraceptives. Cholesterol drugs. We could go on and on. All these products bear known and unavoidable risks, and those risks should not be labeled “defects” and result in potential liability unless the plaintiff can prove an alternate design would feasibly mitigate them. And, no, it is not sufficient to say that the feasible alternative is to use a different product or not use any product at all. As we observed in the aforementioned post, that would convert strict liability into absolute liability. As we asked in yet another post on this topic, are motorcycles defective because full-sized automobiles are generally safer? You get the point.
Last week, the Drug and Device Law Lifelong BFF asked us if we were interested in a quick trip to New York to use tickets for an early morning taping of “Live with Kelly.” Sure, we said – sounds like fun. And so, after nearly two hours in line and significant drama over whether we were in front of or behind the “make it into the studio” line we were told would be drawn, we were seated. And we had a great time. Kelly is as adorable and effervescent as she appears on television. Her guest co-host interjected continuous comments from the “intelligent and engaged host” playbook. And the guests were bona fide celebrities whom it was fun to observe at a distance of a scant ten feet. But what was most impressive about the whole exercise was the opportunity to see what goes into the daily illusion that the hosts and the guests are responsible for the “workings” of an interview show. Because, in fact, the stage was swarming with people who kept the machine operating, and the familiar faces were a tiny nucleus at the center of it all. There were stylists and producers and directors and cameramen everywhere – so much so that they often blocked our view and we resorted to watching on monitors or on the screens mounted on the huge cameras. And we realized that there would be no final product without every piece of this puzzle.
In today’s case, the absence of a requisite puzzle piece – a qualified specific causation expert – doomed the plaintiff’s case. In In re Zoloft Litigation, 2016 WL 5958372 (W. Va. Cir. Ct. Oct. 5, 2016), the court considered the defendants’ motion to exclude the plaintiff’s (general and specific) causation expert, who was a research scientist and not a medical doctor.. The expert had designated the expert to render the opinions that the defendants’ product could cause “deleterious effects both in developmental autonomy, neuroautonomy, and neurological function including the development of autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders,” 2016 WL 5958372 at *1 (emphasis in original), and that the plaintiff’s mother’s ingestion of the product while she was pregnant caused a seizure disorder and “cognitive and neurobehavioral disorder” in the plaintiff. Id.
The expert was deposed, on successive days, in four pending cases including this one. After the first day of his deposition, when he testified on behalf of two other plaintiffs, he met with plaintiffs’ counsel for several hours and drafted an updated disclosure in this case, omitting all references to autism and deleting the opinion that the defendants’ product caused the plaintiff’s seizures. Instead, the new disclosure stated that the expert would testify that the plaintiff’s mother’s use of the product during pregnancy was a cause of the plaintiff’s developmental delays. Id. at *2. Asked to explain why he revised his disclosure, the expert testified that, after “going back over the [plaintiff’s] records in preparation for” his deposition, he “felt it was prudent to focus on the developmental delay” and to delete the opinions that the defendants’ product caused autism and epilepsy. Id. Why? Because the plaintiff had not been clinically diagnosed with autism, and because there was not a “good differential diagnosis” concluding that the plaintiff’s seizures “occurred at the right time to be related to his mother’s use” of the defendants’ product.” Id.
The West Virginia legislature has passed, and the governor signed today, S.B. 15, adopting the learned intermediary rule. Here is a link to the legislative history of the bill. Here is the text of the bill:
[Passed February 17, 2016; in effect 90 days from passage.]
AN ACT to amend the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, by adding thereto a new section, designated §55-7-30, relating generally to manufacturers and sellers of prescription drugs and medical devices and liability of those entities for alleged inadequate warning or instruction; and adopting the learned intermediary doctrine as defense to civil action based upon inadequate warnings or instructions.
Be it enacted by the Legislature of West Virginia:
That the Code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, be amended by adding thereto a new section, designated §55-7-30, to read as follows:
ARTICLE 7. ACTIONS FOR INJURIES.
§55-7-30. Adequate pharmaceutical warnings; limiting civil liability for manufacturers or sellers who provide warning to a learned intermediary.
(a) A manufacturer or seller of a prescription drug or device may not be held liable in a product liability action for a claim based upon inadequate warning or instruction unless the claimant proves, among other elements, that:
(1) The manufacturer or seller of a prescription drug or medical device acted unreasonably in failing to provide reasonable instructions or warnings regarding foreseeable risks of harm to prescribing or other health care providers who are in a position to reduce the risks of harm in accordance with the instructions or warnings; and
(2) Failure to provide reasonable instructions or warnings was a proximate cause of harm.
(b) It is the intention of the Legislature in enacting this section to adopt and allow the development of a learned intermediary doctrine as a defense in cases based upon claims of inadequate warning or instruction for prescription drugs or devices.
NOTE: The purpose of this bill is to adopt and codify the learned intermediary doctrine as a defense to a civil action against a manufacturer or seller of a prescription drug based upon inadequate warnings or instructions.
This is a quick-hit post as we head into the Independence Day holiday weekend. The Southern District of West Virginia’s order this week in McNair v. Johnson & Johnson, No. 2:14-17463, 2015 WL 3935787 (S.D. W. Va. June 26, 2015), dismissed claims against the seller of an innovator drug for precisely the right reason: The defendant neither made nor sold the generic drug that the plaintiff ingested. That is to say, there is no Conte-style “innovator liability” in West Virginia.
It seems obvious, doesn’t it? It has been seven years since the California Court of Appeal issued its wrongly reasoned and wrongly decided opinion in Conte v. Wyeth, where the court held that a plaintiff who used a generic drug could sue the manufacturer of the listed version. As we like to say, the court took the “product” out of product liability and held a company potentially liable for injuries allegedly caused by a product that it did not make and did not sell. The late Roger Traynor and his colleagues on the California Supreme Court, who presaged strict product liability way back in 1944 in Escola v. Coca-Cola Bottling Co., must have rolled in their graves.
The Conte opinion has predictably become an outlier, and courts have rejected the opinion and its reasoning many times over, often expressly. (Check out our Innovator Liability Scorecard here and our survey of innovator liability here.) As we reported here, the Alabama legislature abolished innovator liability just a few months ago, and we believe the California Supreme Court overruled Conte in Crane v. O’Neill, 53 Cal. 4th 335 (2011), where it held that a manufacturer has no duty to warn of hazards in another manufacturer’s product due to “foreseeability.”