As published on Legal Newsline: Public nuisance may be the most successful legal theory ever to have failed in court. States and municipalities this year negotiated $26 billion in settlements with the Big Three drug distributors and Johnson & Johnson – including $2 billion in fees for private plaintiff lawyers Read more…
As published on Legal Newsline: CLEVELAND, March 23, 2021 (Legal Newsline) – As multidistrict litigation swamps federal courts, the judge overseeing the multibillion-dollar opioid MDL demonstrated why plaintiff lawyers love the strategy so much: Because it is extremely effective at extracting settlements from the companies they sue. At a hearing Read more…
MDLs were supposed to be a more efficient way of handling mass-tort lawsuits but unethical practices and the incentives of corporate defendants combine to deliver poor results to plaintiffs. As reported on Legal Newsline: PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 11 (Legal Newsline) – Federal multidistrict litigation, a procedure intended to resolve mass-tort lawsuits Read more…
As published on Legal Newsline: CINCINNATI (April 20, 2020) – Facing a string of damaging rulings by the judge overseeing sprawling litigation against them, some of the nation’s leading retail pharmacy chains resorted to the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass: They sought extraordinary intervention by a higher court to Read more…
An Ohio county that settled opioid lawsuits last year for $105 million paid more than $1 million in legal fees to two law firms that never appeared on any of the court filings, including one associated with a prominent Washington lobbyist whose firm represented multiple companies being sued by the county.
As published on Legal Newsline: CLEVELAND, March 11, 2020 – Their request for some $3 billion in fees has generated fierce resistance from state attorneys general and defendants, but don’t worry about the financial states of private lawyers who represent thousands of municipal plaintiffs in opioid litigation. The 18 law Read more…
As published on Legal Newsline: CLEVELAND, Jan. 14 – A federal judge has ordered the nation’s leading pharmacy chains to turn over billions of nationwide prescription records going back more than 20 years – even as the American Civil Liberties Union and some states attack similar requests by the government Read more…
Yost says the settlement is in danger of descending into the divisiveness that has marked the bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma, where half the states and some 2,000 municipal plaintiff support a proposed $12 billion settlement and half the states object
As published on Legal Newsline: WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Oct. 14, 2019 – The federal bankruptcy judge overseeing Purdue Pharma’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization granted the OxyContin manufacturer and its controlling Sackler family a two-week respite from opioid litigation to work on a settlement that appeases warring state attorneys general and Read more…
As published on Legal Newsline: Sixteen years ago in a case involving gunmaker Sturm, Ruger & Co., a New York appeals court refused to apply public nuisance law against the manufacturer of a legal product, saying that doing so would transform nuisance law “into a monster that would devour in Read more…