Each year, thousands of lawsuits are filed in federal and state courts seeking recovery from manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. These lawsuits include individual actions, actions consolidated into multidistrict litigation, and class actions. The litigation occasionally becomes life-threatening for the defendant corporations, and may breed a public relations nightmare, as occurred with Vioxx, breast implants, and fen-phen. Drug & Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy, by Mark Herrmann and David B. Alden, offers assistance to lawyers who practice in this high-stakes, high-profile, and rapidly-evolving area. The book's primary focus is to provide useful practice pointers and overall strategic guidance for attorneys involved in product liability litigation for prescription drugs and medical devices. It will serve as an indispensable guide to handling such a case from pre-litigation through trial. The legal landscape in this important area is expected to shift as the Supreme Court's decisions in Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc. and Wyeth v. Levine are applied, and as the President and Congress address tort reform and other health care issues. Practitioners will need thoughtful, expert advice to navigate these changes.

Thousands of lawsuits continue to be filed in federal and state courts each year to seek recovery from manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and medical devices. These lawsuits include individual actions, actions consolidated into federal multidistrict litigation, multi-plaintiff cases, and class actions. As drug and device litigation remains as active as ever, companies that develop new drugs and devices continue to face significant and often costly product liability litigation in the United States. This new and revised edition of Drug & Device Product Liability Litigation Strategy provides detailed background, discussion, and strategic guidance to those practicing in this field. The book offers lawyers a detailed analysis of the full range of issues involved in drug and device litigation, including pre-litigation counselling, document preservation and discovery, consolidation and mass joinder, multidistrict litigation, class action litigation, admissibility of expert testimony, dispositive and pre-trial motion practice, jury selection, and trial. This second edition not only contains thorough revisions to reflect recent changes in the legal landscape following key court decisions and statutory developments in areas such as preemption, admissibility of expert testimony, the learned intermediary doctrine, and innovator liability, but also contains new analyses of issues such as personal jurisdiction, pre-litigation counselling, and the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. It is an indispensable guide to lawyers handling cases in this high-stake, high-profile, and rapidly evolving area.