Just the other daywe brought you news that the British medical journal Lancet issued a full retractionof an purported scientific article by a plaintiffs’ expert in autism litigation. The author, who was at the time also serving as a plaintiff-side expert, described parts of his research in a manner that “have been proven to be false.”

Something similar seems to be happening in the Accutane litigation. There’s Read the rest of this entry »

What does a smokeless “electronic cigarette” have to do with drugs and medical devices? Well, according to the FDA, an electronic cigarette is a “drug-device combination.” Lately, however, it seems that the Agency’s position has become a strategic misstep. It gave rise to this a recent opinion by Judge Richard Leon, Smoking Everywhere, Inc. v. FDA, ___ F.Supp.2d ___, 2010 WL 129667 (D.D.C. Jan. 14, 2010). Although the Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC is reporting that the British Medical Journal Lancet has issued a full retraction of the notorious 1998 article that claimed there was an increased risk of autism associated with use of the MMR vaccine. Among the grounds for the retraction: the lead author “was in the pay of solicitors who were acting for parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR” and that author “was ruled last week to have broken research rules.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever noticed how you notice the same thing everywhere when you’re thinking about it? If you’re contemplating purchase of a station wagon, you see station wagons all over the place (sort of like the parking lot of a 1970’s Bobby Sherman concert).

We’ve been thinking about ex parte interviews with treating doctors. We’re working on them for paying clients. We blogged about a recent case here. And what do we get? A reader sent usa Read the rest of this entry »

Over two years ago (have we really been at this so long we can say that?) we wrote a post “Docs for the Goose, Docs for the Gander,” in which we praised Weiss v. Astellas Pharma, US., Inc., 2007 WL 2137782 (E.D. Ky. June 25, 2007), for requiring an even playing field when it came to the always-contentious issue of informal defense interviews with plaintiffs’ treating physicians. In Weiss, the plaintiff’s Read the rest of this entry »

As we said last week, because it’s a Dechert case, we can’t comment directly on Clark v. Pfizer, Inc., 2010 WL 163583, slip op.(Pa. Super. Jan. 19, 2010). However, we were sufficiently inspired by what’s in the opinion that we thought this would be a good time to put in our two cents worth about one of the theories that theClark plaintiffs pursued: “fraud on the market.”

As defense lawyers, we want to Read the rest of this entry »

As we said last week, because it’s a Dechert case, we can’t comment directly on Clark v. Pfizer, Inc., 2010 WL 163583, slip op.(Pa. Super. Jan. 19, 2010). However, we were sufficiently inspired by what’s in the opinion that we thought this would be a good time to put in our two cents worth about one of the theories that theClark plaintiffs pursued: “fraud on the market.”

As defense lawyers, we want to Read the rest of this entry »

Caveat Emptor….

That’s the take-away that we gleen from the Transobturator Sling Products MDL, where the court recently granted in part and denied in part a motion to quash a subpoena served on a non-party former competitor (!!)of the device manufacturer that’s a defendant in that MDL.

Here’s the back story: the defendant in this MDL is Mentor Corporation. Mentor manufactured a medical device called Read the rest of this entry »

Last week’s decision in Carr v. Tillery, 2010 WL 92487 (7th Cir. Jan. 12, 2010), was not, strictly speaking, a product liability case. But it involves some key players in that field, and a very key location. And, truth be told, the case appeals to the voyeur within us.

The players are former partners in a plaintiff class action law firm that made a nice business out of hauling corporations (e.g., IBM, Pfizer, Xerox) into Madison Read the rest of this entry »

As long-time readers know, this blog was founded by a couple of guys who first got to know each other defending co-defendant manufacturers in the Orthopedic Bone Screw Mass Tort. That fact significantly colors what you read here. A lot of the issues that we harp on– off-label use, medical device preemption, fraud on the FDA, cross-jurisdictional class action tolling, broken device cases, expert testimony on issues of (FDA) law (that’s Read the rest of this entry »