On February 7, 2025, Judge Walker, sitting in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, ruled that the Plaintiff (a subsidiary of a parent company engaged in nationwide talcum powder litigation)...more
From medical devices to OTC drugs, preemption to expert preclusion, New York state and federal courts issued decisions in 2024 which further shaped the landscape in the medical and life sciences legal world. To prepare the...more
Class certification decisions under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mark a critical stage in any putative class action lawsuit. Rule 23(a) requires plaintiffs to prove, among other things, that “there are...more
An expert witness is not supposed to pick a desired result and then reverse engineer inputs and methods that reach that result. As the Ninth Circuit observed 30 years ago, “[c]oming to a firm conclusion first and then doing...more
There are few legal phrases more fun to say than “ipse dixit.” The phrase is most commonly used in motions to exclude experts who base their opinions on nothing more than their own say so...more
In Smith v. Spectrum Brands, Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 142262, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (District Court) considered whether the plaintiffs’ liability expert met the...more
A plaintiff who alleges that a product is defective usually has to offer expert testimony in support of that allegation. This should come as no surprise for complex products – if it took a team of scientists and engineers to...more
In recent years, conjoint analysis has proliferated as a methodology for calculating class-wide damages in consumer class actions. While conjoint analysis first emerged as a marketing tool for measuring consumers’ relative...more
In Allstate Ins. Co. v. LG Elecs. USA, Inc., No. 19-3529, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 127014, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania considered whether plaintiff’s expert engineer’s opinion that...more
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) issued a Transfer Order on April 3, 2019 centralizing lawsuits against 3M relating to allegations of issues regarding the design, testing, sale, and marketing of the...more
Put quotes around the phrase “litigation science” and Google it. Go ahead, we’ll wait. . . . . What did you find? Not good, right. You found a lot. Too much. The first Google page alone shows how controversial this...more