Opinion ID: 1207107
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Action Against Squibb

Text: Plaintiff alleged in her second cause of action that she could not identify the specific manufacturer of the drug taken by her mother and that Squibb supplied a substantial percentage of the drug to prevent miscarriage. By these allegations, plaintiff sought recovery under the market share theory advanced in Sindell v. Abbott Laboratories, supra, 26 Cal.3d 588. In that case, the plaintiff charged in her complaint that defendant manufacturers of DES, with knowledge that it might cause cancer in the daughters of the mothers who took the drug, failed to adequately test it for safety or to warn of its dangers. She could not identify the producer of the drug actually ingested by her mother, and for that reason the trial court sustained defendants' demurrers to the complaint. We reversed the judgment, reasoning substantially as follows: The general rule is that the burden of proof is on the plaintiff to establish that the injuries she suffered were caused by the conduct of the defendant. This rule is not without its exceptions, however, including the doctrine of alternative liability applied in Summers v. Tice (1948) 33 Cal.2d 80 [199 P.2d 1, 5 A.L.R.2d 91]. In Summers, the plaintiff had suffered an injury to his eye after the two defendants had each shot a gun in his direction. The plaintiff was unable to demonstrate which of the defendants was responsible for his injury. It was held that he was not barred from pursuing the action, because the circumstances justified shifting the burden of proof to the two defendants to absolve themselves if they could. This would not be unfair, it was reasoned, because both had acted negligently toward the plaintiff, and they would both escape liability if the plaintiff were forced to choose between them and was unable to isolate which was responsible. We declined to apply this holding without modification to the drug manufacturer defendants in Sindell. Nevertheless, we held in Sindell, because of policy considerations spelled out in our opinion, that plaintiff and those in her position should not be bereft of a remedy. We stated that the likelihood that any of the defendants caused the plaintiff's injuries should be measured not by the number of DES manufacturers joined as defendants  only five of two hundred manufacturers were defendants in the action  but by the percentage which the DES sold by each of them for the purpose of preventing miscarriage bore to the entire production of the drug sold by all producers of the identical formula for that purpose. If plaintiff joined in the action the manufacturers of a substantial share of the DES which her mother might have taken, the injustice of shifting the burden of proof to defendants to demonstrate that they could not have made the substance which injured plaintiff would be considerably diminished. (26 Cal.3d at p. 612.) We recognized that there were practical problems involved in defining the market and determining market share, but held that these were matters of proof which could not be determined at the pleading stage. ( Id., at p. 613.) The Sindell decision has generated numerous commentaries. (E.g., DES Ruling Shakes Product Liability Field (1980) 66 A.B.A.J. 827; Note (1982) 18 Cal. Western L.Rev. 143; Note (1981) 11 Golden Gate L.Rev. 917; Note (1981) 94 Harv.L.Rev. 668; Note (1982) U. Ill.L.Rev. 1003; Note (1981) 60 Neb.L.Rev. 432; Note (1981) Okla.L.Rev. 843; Note (1981) 8 Pepperdine L.Rev. 1011; Note (1981) 33 Stan.L.Rev. 937; Note (1981) Utah L.Rev. 655; Comment (1981) 26 Vill.L.Rev. 997.) Some of these comments relate to the appropriate composition of the market for application of the market share doctrine and the meaning of the term substantial share as used in the opinion. (E.g., Fischer, Products Liability  An Analysis of Market Share Liability (1981) 34 Vand.L.Rev. 1623, 1642-1645; Note (1981) 69 Cal.L.Rev. 1179, 1189-1193, 1197-1199; Comment, The Market Share Theory (1981) 19 Hous.L.Rev. 107, 128-129.) At the trial level here, plaintiff confined her offer of proof to a national market for DES. (3a) Our only inquiry, therefore, is whether, as the trial court determined, a 10 percent share of this market is insufficient as a matter of law to allow plaintiff to proceed on the basis of the market share doctrine. Plaintiff appears to contend that the doctrine was designed to accomplish a fair approximation of the damages which each defendant DES manufacturer would be required to pay under the principles of comparative fault ( American Motorcycle Assn. v. Superior Court (1978) 20 Cal.3d 578 [146 Cal. Rptr. 182, 578 P.2d 899]), and that its applicability is unrelated to whether plaintiff has joined as defendants the manufacturers of a substantial share of the DES market. This claim lacks merit. The major issue decided in Sindell was whether and the circumstances under which a plaintiff in a DES case could avoid application of the usual rule that she had the burden of proving the defendant manufacturer produced the DES which caused her injuries. The opinion makes it clear that in order to shift the burden of proof on the issue of causation in fact, a plaintiff must join in the action the manufacturers of a substantial share of the DES which her mother might have taken. (26 Cal.3d at p. 612.) Although we stated that the defendant manufacturers could cross-complain against other DES manufacturers not joined in the action, which might have supplied the injury-causing product, we were careful to qualify the statement with the observation that such pleadings would be filed by defendants only after plaintiff has met her burden of joining the required defendants. ( Ibid. ) We must determine, therefore, whether Squibb's 10 percent market share is a substantial percentage of the market for the application of the rule laid down in Sindell. Plaintiff, relying on general definitions of the word substantial asserts that the term must be defined in the context of a particular case, [5] and since Squibb was alleged to be the second largest seller of DES in the country, its 10 percent market share must be deemed substantial in the framework of DES litigation. We reject this contention because it is contrary to the theoretical justification underlying the market share doctrine. We pointed out in Sindell that a major reason why shifting the burden of proof from plaintiff to defendants was warranted in Summers was that both parties who were or could have been responsible for the harm to the plaintiff were joined as defendants. Thus, there was a 50 percent chance that one of the defendants was responsible for the injury. (26 Cal.3d at p. 602.) We declined to apply an unmodified Summers rationale to the facts in Sindell, because only five of the two hundred manufacturers of the DES which could have harmed plaintiff were before the court, and therefore there was no rational basis upon which to infer that any defendant in this action caused plaintiff's injuries, nor even a reasonable possibility that they were responsible. ( Id., at pp. 602-603.) Instead, we concluded that the likelihood that one of the defendants supplied the DES should be determined not by the number of manufacturers joined in the action but by the percentage which the DES sold by each to prevent miscarriage bore to the entire production of the drug sold for that purpose. We held that if the plaintiff joined in the action the manufacturers of a substantial share of the DES which her mother might have taken, the injustice of shifting the burden of proof to defendants to exonerate themselves would be significantly diminished. We declined to declare a specific percentage of the market which would satisfy application of the doctrine, but stated only that it must be substantial. Since Squibb had only a 10 percent share of the DES market, there is only a 10 percent chance that it produced the drug causing plaintiff's injuries, and a 90 percent chance that another manufacturer was the producer. In this circumstance, it must be concluded that she failed to meet the threshold requirement for the application of the market share doctrine. The trial court was justified in ruling, therefore, that she could not proceed to trial on the second cause of action. The trial of the first cause of action, which was confined to the question whether Squibb was in fact the manufacturer of the drug taken by plaintiff's mother, concluded with a jury verdict in Squibb's favor. Since plaintiff had the burden of proof on this issue, her contention that the trial court erred in instructing the jury to that effect is without merit. The conclusion that Exclusive may not be held strictly liable and that plaintiff cannot proceed against Squibb on a market share theory makes it unnecessary to discuss other issues raised by plaintiff. The judgment is affirmed.