On December 6, 2007, Judge David Katz, the federal judge who oversees the Ortho Evra multi-district litigation proceedings in Cleveland issued a scheduling order for the first trials to be conducted in the federal system. Judge Katz oversees more than 1,400 lawsuits pending against Johnson & Johnson (http://www.jnj.com/home.htm) and its subsidiaries relating to the controversial Ortho Evra...
Great strides were made in 2007 to educate the courts and juries about the great deception over the past few decades that led many to ingest combination hormone therapy products such as Prempro and Premarin in combination with Provera. Conventional wisdom about these hormones is finally shifting, especially in light of an unprecedented drop in national cancer registries that dovetails with the...
Jury selection will begin on September 10, 2007, in the latest round in the HRT litigation involving Wyeth. Pfizer was also a defendant in the case, but, according to Bloomberg, settled with the plaintiffs in late August. This trial involves the claims of three Nevada women, one of whom is terminal, who developed breast cancer after taking the combination hormone replacement therapy drugs...
Schering-Plough is now facing eight lawsuits in coordinated federal MDL proceedings in Newark. These lawsuits follow a plea agreement in which the company agreed to pay $435 million to settle criminal and civil charges stemming from its improper, off-label marketing programs and payment of "kickbacks" to prescribing physicians. The pending lawsuits involve several popular Schering-Plough drugs:...
Winning and losing cases is the lot of trial lawyers. We have our unbelievable wins and our equally unbelievable losses. The feelings of an experienced trial lawyer are expressed at Albany Lawyer in his post, Why it's hard to be a trial lawyer.I can only add that losing hurts more when it happens before a case can be decided by a jury. The derailment of a personal injury claim by the entry of...
When a surgeon bills one of my injured clients $75,000 or more for a single surgical procedure, several things happen, not necessarily in this sequence:1. I regret my decision to attend law school rather than medical school.2. I wonder if there has been a typo on the bill.3. Any group health insurance company to whom the bill is submitted immediately pulls out its microscope and chopping...
Should your personal injury claim be handled by a tall lawyer or one with a warm personality? Should he have a way with words? What law school should he have attended? I don't have a clue. And, I don't think it matters.What does matter (and it matters a lot) is what fellow InjuryBoard blogger from Vermont, Ed Van Dorn, discusses in his recent post.Personal Injury Firm's Track RecordWhen a...
A Florida Appellate Court decision informs us that a reasonable careful person is not required to use the highest degree of care in regard to the safe storage of a firearm. Call me crazy, but I feel it would be certifiably unreasonable for anyone not to use the highest degree of care in safely storing a firearm. Why would we accept a lower or the lowest degree of care in dealing with a gun...
If anyone needs evidence that allowing negligent defendants to have court files sealed from public view is wrong, wrong, wrong, they should read this article in the Seattle Times:Woman's coma leads to secrecy, silenceSylvia Lane, a diabetic, lay in her apartment bed in Lynnwood, comatose and alone, her blood and brain in desperate need of sugar.But the medical device she'd just received instead...
Every week I prepare clients for the taking of their depositions by the opposing attorney. Then, I sit with my clients as the opposing attorney questions my client for two or more hours under oath with a court reporter present. My stress level during my client's deposition may actually be higher than my client's. Why? Because I know how a loose tongue can undermine an entire case.Michael...
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