Published By: Maxwell S. Kennerly, Esquire

mass torts

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The lawsuit brought by financier Amir Shenaq against mass-torts law firm AkinMears has made the rounds of the tort reform blogs (e.g., SETexas Record, Daniel Fisher at Forbes, and Paul Barrett at Bloomberg), so I figured some plaintiff-side commentary was in order. The details of the lawsuit confirm what I’ve been saying for years: “Mass torts is not an area in which you want to dabble and start throwing around discounts. It’s work, it’s risky, and it can be very, very expensive.”

In essence, a former hedge fund executive filed suit against the law firm claiming that he was hired to raise millions of dollars in funding so that the firm could acquire thousands of transvaginal mesh lawsuits. He alleges that he brought in the funding (through his connections in the finance world), but, once he did, the firm fired him.

Shenaq’s complaint was filed publicly then sealed by the court. As Forbes recounts, the Complaint alleges:

“AkinMears is not run like a traditional plaintiff’s law office, and the Firm’s lawyers do not do the types of things that regular trial lawyers do,” like meet clients, file pleadings and motions, attend depositions “or, heaven forbid, try a lawsuit,” Shenaq claims in his suit. “Despite the fact that AkinMears’ lawyers do not have to dirty their hands with the mundane chores that come with actually practicing law,” the firm charges a 40% contingency fee “which is then divided in some fashion among the participants in its ever-shifting syndicate.”

And, of course, there’s also an allegation about the plaintiff’s lawyers buying themselves an interest in a private jet.
Continue Reading The Lucrative Mass Torts Scam That Wasn’t

The transvaginal mesh litigation has for some time been the largest medical mass tort ever, at least as measured by filings in the federal multi-district litigation (MDL), which is currently being handled in the Southern District of West Virginia. There are over 42,000 cases in the MDL — more than the combined total of cases ever filed in the Prempro MDL (9,761), the Yasmin and Yaz MDL (11,423), the Vioxx MDL (10,319), and the DePuy ASR Hip Implant MDL (8,900). (See this chart under “Total Actions.”) Add to that the over 6,000 mesh cases pending in New Jersey state court, and numerous cases filed in other state courts, and there are nearly 50,000 transvaginal mesh claims pending in courts across the country against six different manufacturers.

So what are the courts supposed to do with that many cases?

There’s no shortage of inventive (and often problematic) suggestions for how to resolve mass torts cases, ranging from ‘offensive collateral estoppel’ to ‘statistical sampling of verdicts.’ (Naturally, defense-oriented interests are quite fond of coming up with “solutions” that are merely veiled ways either to drag the litigation on forever or to put insurmountable pre-trial barriers in front of plaintiffs.) But the only tried-and-true method is the one I mentioned a year and a half ago in “How Judges Can Settle Mass Torts Cases:” “defendants and their insurance companies don’t willingly make reasonable settlement offers. The only thing that brings them to the table is the immediate threat of trial. If judges want to resolve these cases, they need to move them along to trial.”

But when you’re talking about 50,000 medical device cases, that’s easier said than done. The federal courts conduct fewer than 3,500 civil trials each year.

So where can we look for guidance? The closest analogy to the transvaginal mesh litigation is the Diet Drugs litigation, which had roughly 20,000 claims filed in the federal MDL and about 12,000 filed in Philadelphia’s Complex Litigation Center, making it about three-fifths the size of the transvaginal mesh litigation. But some of the lessons learned there might not help us here, because that litigation was comparatively less complicated: the litigation was against a single company (Wyeth), and it involved products that the company had at least implicitly admitted were defective by way of withdrawing them from the market. In the transvaginal mesh lawsuits, however, there are four different major defendants — Ethicon, C.R. Bard, Boston Scientific, and American Medical Systems each have thousands of cases filed against them — and, not only do the defendants adamantly maintain that their products are perfectly fine, but many of the products are still on the market. There’s thus a potential, perhaps even a likelihood, for this litigation to grow endlessly as only a handful of claims are resolved each year while hundreds, potentially thousands, of new claims accumulate each year.

That scenario raises the question: is the transvaginal mesh litigation headed towards the same “black hole” in which the over 180,000 cases in the asbestos MDL sat for nearly thirty years? If so, how do we get out? 
Continue Reading Why The Transvaginal Mesh Litigation Won’t Become A “Black Hole” Like Asbestos

The American Tort Reform Association’s Annual Report on “Judicial Hellholes” is out again.

Whoops, I mixed up my link — that’s a link to reasonable commentary by the Center for Justice & Democracy. The actual misleading, faux-scientific report is here. My take is similar to The Pop Tort’s ode to the judicial hellholes list:…

Hindsight is 20–20, or so defense lawyers like to say when their clients are caught poisoning thousands, sometimes millions, of people.

Such will almost certainly be the case once the class-action litigation over BPA finally heats up. The latest product to be found guilty of leeching the toxic pseudo-hormone into unknowing customers is ordinary point-of-sale…