The New Jersey jury awarded $9.0 Million in punitive damages. Perfect. Within the range of reason. Merck will suffer the sting of the shilling but not be able to argue that it took a head shot. Recall that punitives were capped at $22.5M. Nice work. BIG NEWS: Under New Jersey…
Read this, please: “John Fund [of the WSJ], after discussing how disgruntled the GOP base may be, has it exactly right: ‘Republicans have appeared to the world to be as unprincipled and rudderless as the politicians they campaigned against back in 1994. Unless they change course dramatically in the seven…
The Arizona Court of Appeals has decided that a plaintiff can recover the full value of her medical bills in a tort case and that the amount of the bills should not be reduced by contractual discounts. The case is Lopez v. Safeway Stores, Inc. (2 CA-CV 2005-0057, 2/28/06). The…
I am a little late in posting today because I have been busy preparing for a speech and panel discussion in Knoxville. The Tennessee Journal of Law & Policy is honoring Justices Drowota, Anderson and Birch today; I have been invited to speak about the impact that these gentlemen have…
Surprise! You cannot collect a contingent fee if your client rejects a settlement offer and later collects nothing. In this Louisana Supreme Court decision in the case of Cullpepper & Carroll v. Cole (No. 05-C-1136) attorneys sought a one-third fee of a rejected settlement proposal in an estate case. Check…
The New Jersey trial judge is going to let the jury decide the punitive damages issue. The arguments on punitives will be heard on Monday. Read more here.
Chiropractors get a bad rap and almost certainly an unfair rap. But this type of news stories do not do the profession any good. Time travel?
It is getting worse. A study of patients in our Medicare population has found an alarming number of incidents and deaths. The study looked discharge records of Medicare patients and used 16 of “20 indicators for potentially preventable patient safety incidents that could be readily identified in hospital discharge data.…
Now, the punitive damage phase. Read here.
The jury returned a verdict in the New Jersey Vioxx trial yesterday afternoon. The jury found that Merck had failed to warn the men about the risks of heart attack and stroke associated with Vioxx but found a causal link between the drug and a heart attack for only one…