Source: https://www.litigationandtrial.com/attorney/racketeering/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 02:44:40+00:00

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As a lawyer, you’re either a conversationalist, a counselor, a writer, a storyteller, or some mixture of them all. I spend a fair amount of my time reading or writing pleadings and briefs, a fair amount of time either preparing a story (through discovery and depositions) or telling a story (at a court hearing or at trial), and the remainder of my time counseling clients.
Levine’s work is most famous for its urban perspective, and its depiction of blue-collar life in Detroit. But while he was working in the factories, he found nothing poetic about them.
The whole article is worth a read, in part for his stories about that blue collar work, which remind me of Studs Terkel.
If you were diagnosed with bladder cancer after using Actos and are reviewing your legal options, please see my Actos Bladder Cancer Lawyers page for patients.
I wrote this post for my legal blog, which is ordinarily read by other lawyers. Patients looking for legal help should read the Actos page linked above.
Personal injury law isn’t like running an ordinary business, not even an ordinary law practice, because of the risk involved in taking cases. Defective drug and consumer products lawsuits exemplify both extremes of our work: the cases are enormously expensive to pursue and require a tremendous amount of attorney time, but they also have the potential to be lucrative blockbusters.
Problem is, once a drug or product is shown to be unreasonably harmful by a study or a recall, there’s no way for us to know for certain what the courts will do with the lawsuits. We don’t roll the dice — it’s much more rational and systematic than that — but we have to play the odds. So it will be with Actos lawsuits: we believe the drug was inadequately tested and didn’t warn patients of the risks, and will vigorously pursue cases against their manufacturer, but the cases aren’t without considerable risk.
Consider the denture cream lawsuits. To paraphrase what I wrote last week while discussing asbestos lawyers, GlaxoSmithKline settled the vast majority of Super Poligrip claims, but Proctor and Gamble fought the Fixodent cases, resulting a judge dismissing one of the bellwhether cases on Daubert grounds.
both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued warnings about the cancer risk based on new research, but they have allowed sales to continue. Doctors are being told not to prescribe Actos for people who have or have had bladder cancer.
The warning will limit patient choices and could spell the end for a once-promising class of Type 2 diabetes drugs that debuted more than a decade ago amid heavy promotion.
Actos, despite links to heart failure risk and other serious side effects, became the No. 1 diabetes pill after Avandia, the only other drug in that class, was found in 2007 to sharply increase risk of heart attacks. Avandia’s use was banned in the EU and sharply restricted here. Actos sales jumped from about $2.9 billion in 2006 to more than $4.3 billion last year.
Avandia’s restriction, of course, prompted its own wave of lawsuits, and GlaxoSmithKline has settled about 12,000 of them for around $700 million. Assuming the clients are on one-third contingent fee agreements, that’s over $200 million for the lawyers. I don’t say that to be critical; one of those firms, for example, recently spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on an antitrust action just to lose and then also get hit with almost $600,000 in costs. It’s a big-risk, big-reward kind of business, and one of the few elements of society keeping medical products safe in light of the broken clearance processes we have for new drugs and devices.
The quarry has turned on the hunter in a West Virginia courtroom, and now one of the nation’s biggest transportation companies is locked in a bitter fight with one of Pittsburgh’s most prominent trial law firms.
Prominent advocates for both the plaintiffs’ bar and defense bar said they could not think of another case in which a corporation that endured mass litigation retaliated by turning the RICO statute against its tormentor. They disagreed on the significance of the development.
“The requirements [to prove RICO] are significant and pretty hard to meet under most circumstances,” said Christopher Placitella, a prominent litigator and writer on asbestosis law with the Philadelphia-based plaintiffs’ firm Cohen Placitella & Roth. “You really have to have a unique set of facts” including a conspiracy, multiple criminal acts and a resulting loss of property.
As a result, other plaintiffs’ firms aren’t likely to be chilled by one RICO case, he said.
This isn’t entirely breaking news; six months ago the Fourth Circuit reinstated the case over statute of limitations defenses, reported about here by the anti-consumer folks at Forbes. The full complaint is new, though.
then, after a few cases didn’t win, the large corporation turned around and sued the trial lawyers under RICO allegations, alleging the whole thing was a scheme to defraud the corporation, etc.
I expect to see more of these claims in the future. Consider the denture cream zinc poisoning litigation; GlaxoSmithKline settled the vast majority of Super Poligrip claims, but Proctor and Gamble is fighting the Fixodent cases (pardon the expression) tooth and nail. It wouldn’t surprise me if P&G turned around on some of the losing claims and sued the plaintiffs’ firms — many of whom settled hundreds, some thousands of those cases successfully — claiming the whole thing was a fraud on the court. The whole point is to empty the pockets of the lawyers successful in particular niches and to intimidate plaintiffs’ lawyers, deterring them from filing suits, meritorious or not.
syndicate lawyers who don’t put up any money but provide sheer time and energy into litigating these cases for a portion of the attorneys’ fees at the end (this is why you sometimes see the ironic situation of a solo practitioner who practices “complex litigation” out of their home office – they do indeed practice in the area, in that they’re constantly writing briefs or discussing strategy or arguing at hearings, but they are not the ones taking calls from clients, setting clients up with physicians, paying expert fees, etc.).
backers, i.e. well-capitalized firms helping to fund the litigation but who aren’t taking an active role in the litigation.
(Other than “referral lawyers,” I made those terms up.) MDL litigation like the denture cream myelopathy lawsuits can involve all four, but asbestos lawsuits tend to only really involve #1 and #3.
One thing you learn as a personal injury lawyer is that many everyday products are far more dangerous than you thought. Until I became a lawyer and began screening cases and receiving calls, I hadn’t a clue that Children’s Motrin could cause Stevens-Johnson Syndrome.
Tylenol is another example. I’ve used acetaminophen safely for years without a problem, and I thanked my lucky stars for it when 1,000mg of the stuff brought me back from the delirium caused by a 104+ fever. Every week, though, approximately ten people die and one-thousand are sent to the emergency department by acetaminophen overdosing.
155. In May and June of 2009, the FDA discovered that from April through June 2008, McNeil had used microcrystalline cellulose, an ingredient used in liquid adult and children’s Tylenol products, that had been potentially contaminated with a gram negative bacteria, Burkholder cepacia.
160. Beginning in approximately the Fall of 2008, McNeil began receiving reports regarding musty, moldy odors emanating from McNeil Tylenol pills manufactured at its Las Piedrad, Puerto Rico facility.
161. McNeil did not fully investigate these reports for approximately one year notwithstanding McNeal’s obligation to notify the FDA of such reports within three days.
transported packaging materials for the medications.
chromium particulate contamination, involving McNeil’s liquid infant and children’s products including Tylenol, Motrin, Benadryl, Zyrtec and Tylenol Infants’ Drops.
You can read the first “Form 483” reports generated by the FDA here. Obviously something went very wrong with the McNeil compliance process, prompting recalls, an unknown amount of physical injury, and economic loss to the many consumers who bought those products (including myself).
The Amended Complaint was just dismissed, with leave to amend against Johnson & Johnson and McNeil.
Big news in the sporting and antitrust litigation worlds — which overlap considerably — on Friday when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit (which hears all appeals in federal cases filed in the states between North Dakota, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Nebraska), reversed a preliminary injunction imposed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota prohibiting the NFL owners from imposing a “lockout” on players.
The order is posted here; when I reference Opinion and Bye Dissent below, I’m referring to that PDF. Two judges, Colloton and Benton (both appointed by George W. Bush — hold that thought) voted in favor of dissolving the injunction while the third judge, Bye (Clinton), provided a lengthy dissent.
As with all sports law news, start with Michael McCann. Here’s his Sports Illustrated column on the ruling. It’s a good summary; I’m going to get more technical and legally opinionated than he can get in an SI column. (Short version of our conclusions: we both agree that a request for en banc review is unlikely, but I’m more sanguine on the players’ odds in a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.) ESPN has a Q&A as well. Howard Bashman has a round-up of stories here.
It’s probably best to start with the court did not do: the court did not rule on any of the antitrust allegations made by the players. The antitrust case filed by the players can continue to go forward. The court didn’t even rule on whether the players were entitled to an injunction under antitrust law; rather, the court held that labor law precluded the current players from obtaining an injunction and restricted the type of injunction the prospective players could get.
According to one person briefed on negotiations, the timing of the court’s opinion — issued in the morning — was “awful” and “not helpful” to the talks, unsettling them just as the sides hoped to finish discussions on the revenue split, the heart of the dispute.
The decision emboldened the hawks among both parties, the person said, inspiring some owners to want more concessions from players, and some on the players’ side to want to press their case, with the prospect that the court could allow antitrust damages.
It seems more than a little strange that both sides could feel emboldened by the order, particularly because, on the most basic level, the players lost one of their most valuable bargaining chips, i.e., the District Court order enjoining the lockout. So let’s dig a little bit deeper into what the opinion actually held and what it holds for the future, both for the NFL and for everyday employees.
There’s a lot to unpack here. We’re going to do it with a lot of laterals, like The Play.
The most obvious question is: why are we talking about antitrust at all? For purposes of antitrust law, the players are all one big union, which makes the teams all one big employer, and so the teams — at least with regard to their dealings with players — are likely a “single entity” under antitrust law. The teams thus can’t, as a legal matter, set up a “contract, combination in the form of a trust or otherwise, or, conspiracy, in restraint of trade” as prohibited by § 1 of the Sherman Act. A “single entity,” as they say, can’t agree or conspire with itself.
The players tried to get around that by busting up their own union. Right before the players–teams agreement ran out, the players ended the NFLPA’s status as their collective bargaining representative. The NFLPA then amended its bylaws to prohibit collective bargaining with the teams and filed requests with the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service to be reclassified as no longer being a union.
The NFL teams do not possess either the unitary decision-making quality or the single aggregation of economic power characteristic of independent action. Each of the teams is a substantial, independently owned, and inde­pendently managed business.
Thus, as the players have argued, the teams can be liable for engaging in anticompetitive practices that violate § 1 of the Sherman Act, including limiting compensation for just-drafted rookie players, capping salaries for current players, and imposing restrictions on free agents like the “franchise player” and “transition player” designations.
At least that’s the players’ theory. Will it work? Maybe not: despite the American Needle case, which came to the Supreme Court on a very narrow issue — that is, if it was legally possible for the teams to be sued under antitrust laws — the Supreme Court and other federal appellate courts have been notoriously hostile to antitrust claims over the past few years. Consider AT&T v. Twombly (I discussed it briefly here; Twombly kicked off the line of cases later generally referred to as Ashcroft v. Iqbal), which dismissed — before even allowing discovery, much less trial — a fairly compelling antitrust case against the telecommunications companies. Truth is, the Supreme Court just plain doesn’t like consumers and employees.
Appealing to the Supreme Court (which they can do even after an en banc appeal, though it takes longer, and if the Supreme Court accepts the case, though certiorari isn’t assured).
I don’t see why they wouldn’t do #2 or #3. My hunch is that they’ll skip straight to #3: the Eighth Circuit is the most Republican Circuit in the nation, with 9 of its 11 active judges appointed by Republican Presidents (7 by George W. Bush), and so they’re arguably the most hostile Circuit towards unions, employees and consumers. With the Supreme Court, the players at least have a chance.
So let’s figure out what happened in the opinion.
Lady Gaga Lawsuit: Exposing Fraud Or Advertising Lawyers?
Olympic rowing twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are pushing ahead with another suit against Facebook, a day after they decided not to appeal [to the] U.S. Supreme Court [a] ruling [by the Ninth Circuit] upholding their $65 million settlement with Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg.
I added the edits above because the original report was just wrong.
The continuation of the Winklevosses’ suit caught a lot of people off-guard: how can the Winklevosses continue a lawsuit in one court when another court has already held that they settled all of their claims?
Grab a cup of coffee and pick up your wands, we’re going beyond 1L Civil Procedure.
alleg[ed] that the Winklevosses and ConnectU hacked into Facebook to purloin user data, and tried to steal users by spamming them. The ensuing litigation involved several other parties and gave bread to many lawyers, but the details are not particularly relevant here.
Indeed. That Ninth Circuit opinion was quite boring by legal standards: it held that the one-and-one-third page term sheet that the ConnectU plaintiffs signed with the Facebook defendants following a mediation — in which the ConnectU plaintiffs released all their claims in exchange for cash and a piece of Facebook — was enforceable. The ConnectU plaintiffs came up with a couple clever arguments, like the claim that Facebook misrepresented its value and thus violated securities laws, but none of those really mattered: that one-and-one-third page term sheet was good enough to create an enforceable settlement.
Ordinarily, there’s nothing more to do. The Winklevosses released and settled all of their claims, including the ones in Massachusetts. Typically, if there are multiple cases and one case ends with an agreement or opinion holding that all claims are released, the plaintiff files a praecipe or stipulation to dismiss the case. If they don’t, the defendant files a pro forma page-or-two motion moving to enforce the settlement and dismiss the case.
So, what gives? Can the Winklevosses really set aside the settlement agreement, despite the Ninth Circuit’s ruling enforcing it?
On motion and upon such terms as are just, the court may relieve a party … from a final judgment, order, or proceeding for the following reasons: … (3) fraud (whether heretofore denominated intrinsic or extrinsic), misrepresentation, or other misconduct of an adverse party….
The [ConnectU] Founders respectfully submit that Fed.R.Civ.P. 60(b) and Anderson v. Cryovac, Inc., 862 F.2d 910, 928-930 (1st Cir. 1988) warrant an inquiry into whether the Facebook Defendants intentionally or inadvertently suppressed evidence.
Ironically, if you’re in the United States, then you’re likely familiar with the case the Winklevosses rely on, Anderson v. Cryovac, Inc., 862 F.2d 910, 928-930 (1st Cir. 1988), even if you’re not a lawyer. It’s part of the appeal in the environmental contamination / toxic torts case that was the subject of A Civil Action.
You know what’s cool? Apparently a billion dollars isn’t cool, according to Sean Parker, no matter what Justin Timberlake in The Social Network might have to say about it.

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