Articles Posted in Product Liability

|

When it comes to child safety, most of my work revolves around two areas of law:  Defective products and sexual abuse of minors – whether in a school setting or a clergy setting.  Plaintiffs’ injury lawyers sounded the alarm on such issues a long time ago.   I’m proud to say that before plaintiffs’ lawyers did so, untold number of children were seriously injured or killed as a result of these defective products, and untold numbers of minor children were the victims of unspeakable sexual abuse by clergy members and school teachers.

Now, the focus is on internet child safety – specifically, the blind eye that Big Tech has paid to protecting underage children from sexual exploitation – and mental health harm, on the internet.  Earlier this week, a hearing was held on Capitol Hill on the issue of child safety and the internet.  The information revealed in that hearing was extremely disturbing.

A U.S. Senate hearing was called to air the justifiable worries of parents and experts in mental health that social media companies prioritize profits over safety measures that would better protect children in the use of these social media platforms.  At one point, Senator Lindsey Graham (R – South Carolina), told Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (which owns Facebook), “Mr. Zuckerberg, you and the companies before us, I know you don’t mean it to be so, but you have blood on your hands. You have a product that’s killing people.”  Aside from Facebook, Meta owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, in addition to other similar online platforms.

Continue reading

|

A Missouri jury has ruled that Bayer must pay $1.56 billion to four plaintiffs who claimed that the company’s Roundup weed killer caused them serious physical injuries, most importantly, cancer. Bayer has long claimed Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is safe for human use.  So far, the evidence doesn’t support this defense, and the verdicts against Bayer are starting to accumulate. This marks the fourth consecutive legal setback for Bayer, which is battling about165,000 personal injury claims linked to Roundup following its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, and this verdict may intensify investor pressure on the German pharmaceutical and agricultural chemicals company to reassess its legal strategy.

The jury determined that Bayer’s Monsanto division was culpable for negligence, design defects, and insufficiently warning plaintiffs about the potential risks associated with Roundup. The awarded damages encompassed $61.1 million in compensatory damages and $500 million each in punitive damages for Valorie Gunther, Jimmy Draeger, and Daniel Anderson, who linked their non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnoses to Roundup use, and $100,000 for Brenda Draeger. It’s possible that the punitive damages portion of the award may undergo reduction on appeal, but this marks the fourth consecutive legal setback for Bayer, which is battling about165,000 personal injury claims linked to Roundup following its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto

As a Boston defective products lawyer, what I find really offensive about Bayer’s claims, is that this company is known in the public eye for its healthcare products.  Who doesn’t think of Bayer when they think of aspirin?  Yet the truth is that Bayer manufactures an entire range of products, especially farming and agriculture – and several of them can be very dangerous.  In my view, Roundup cases are just another in a seemingly endless parade of corporate irresponsibility and greed.  This kind of corporate conduct is nothing new, but try telling that to someone who’s been diagnosed with cancer.  It’s limited comfort.   But  manufacturers of dangerous products have to be held legally accountable for their actions.  That’s one of the reasons I became a catastrophic injury lawyer.  It isn’t easy; these cases are hard-fought, and any law firm taking these kind of deep-pocketed defendants, needs to have many years of proven, successful experience in the sub-specialty of product liability law.  We have more than 30 years’ experience suing companies that manufacture and market defective products.    If you have questions about Roundup cases or you feel you’ve been harmed because of a defective or unsafe product, contact us.  We’d be glad to provide you a free consultation.

|

While the 1990’s saw a string of very large settlements from class actions against various individual tobacco companies and the tobacco industry in general.  One class action settlement in particular involved hundreds of millions of dollars paid to state governments that sued the tobacco industry for the hundreds of millions in Medicaid funds that the states paid to provide medical care for victims of lung cancer and others illnesses caused by smoking.

But what about individual plaintiffs?  Can they still sue a tobacco company if they feel that their lung cancer or other types of cancer was caused by smoking?

The technical answer is that anyone can file a lawsuit against anyone else, at almost anytime, for anything.  The civil justice system provides that wide access for good reason – -so that no one can be ‘shut out of court’; and so that the average person can take on huge, deep-pocketed defendants.  So that injured victims can take on automakers, dangerous product manufacturers, chemical companies, etc.  Our constitution and system of justice guarantees us all that right.  But the right to file a suit agai9nst someone – and the likelihood of winning that suit – are anything but the same thing.  In fact, they’re world apart.

Continue reading

|

In Part One of my post on this subject, I discussed what Roundup is, what the history of these cases is, how cases are being brought to the courts, and what the possible values of these cases might be for people who have been exposed to it and have developed Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (NHL) or similar types of cancer.  Let’s proceed to whether or not someone who has been exposed to Roundup and has been diagnosed with NHL, might have a legally actionable claim for damages.

How Do I Know If I or A Loved One Has a Case Against Roundup?

One big misunderstanding that all the TV and internet ads about Roundup litigation have created is the idea that anyone who has ever bought and used Roundup, and who now may “not feel good”, has a valid claim. Not true. Plaintiffs who present valid Roundup injury claims, are typically people who have had long-term exposure to Roundup, and later developed Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma or other cancers. Those types of plaintiffs typically are:

Continue reading

|

A good number of my clients have called in to ask me about the Roundup cases that they’ve seen either on TV ads, or on the internet & social media.   It seems that anyone who has ever used this product has a lot of questions about it, so I’ll try to address them in the most accurate, efficient way that I can, given current case law and clinical information on this product.

First, what is Roundup?

Roundup is primarily a weed killer, an herbicide, and it has become the most widely used herbicide in the world. It’s used wherever weeds grow:  Lawns, farms, gardens, greenhouses, parks and more.  It is used commercially by professionals in the farming, landscaping and agricultural sectors, and by homeowners as well.  Monsanto makes Roundup, (though Bayer recently bought Monsanto), and this product earned more than $6 billion in revenue annually in recent years. More than 250 million pounds of it is used each year globally. The ingredient that many believe causes non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and other types of cancers is called glyphosate, and in 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO) termed glyphosate a “probable human carcinogen”.

Continue reading

|

I’ve blogged previously on the topic of the potential dangers of “energy” drinks. Still, seemingly every supermarket I shop in these days, I see these drinks proliferating left & right. Without doubt, these drinks and similar products can potentially injure you. Very high levels of caffeine can cause serious health problems such as cardiac arrhythmias (irregular heartbeat,) anxiety attacks, dangerously blood pressure and, in some cases, even sudden death. The obvious reason: They’re packed full of high-concentrated caffeine. High concentrate caffeine isn’t limited to energy drink products – it’s also marketed in powdered form, pills, and is widely available online. Hospital ER visits caused by high concentrate caffeine and energy drinks doubled over the past four years – from 10,000 to 20,000.

Aside from adults, an enormous number of teenagers and college kids consume the drug in these drinks. And yes, caffeine is a drug – and a highly addictive one, at that. Ever tried talking with someone who hasn’t had his/her morning fix? So, just how concentrated is this stuff? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has reported that a single teaspoon of powdered caffeine is equal to the amount of caffeine contained in a stunning 28 cups of coffee: That’s approximately 1,600 milligrams of caffeine — equal to about 70 cans of Red Bull!  How much caffeine is safe? The FDA recommends a maximum daily limit of 400 milligrams of caffeine (about 5 8 oz. cups of coffee) to minimize safety risks.

So, can you sue if you’ve suffered physical or emotional harm from them? First, remember the maxim that anyone can file a suit over anything – that’s a constitutional right. The salient questions is, would you win? The answer to the last question, is “It depends”

Continue reading

|

I wrote in this blog recently of the many suits filed in the past few years against Johnson & Johnson alleging that its famous baby powder products cause cancer in women. That fight remains ongoing. But J&J’s legal woes over its products aren’t in any way limited to over-the-counter consumer goods like talc or baby powder. Many of the lawsuits it has faced involve its prescription drugs.

One of those drugs is Levaquin, which was developed by J&J as a type of antibiotic. Levaquin belongs to the fluoroquinolone class of antibiotics, and was marketed by J&J to treat relatively minor infections, such as sinus infections and urinary tract infections (UTI’s.) Sounds admirable enough, except that plaintiffs’ suits in several states, including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, allege that the giant health and pharmaceutical company very aggressively marketed Levaquin, while knowing that the antibiotic could cause a dangerous medical condition called peripheral neuropathy – a very serious nerve disorder. Often times, this dangerous disorder can become permanent – resulting in loss of nerve sensation and partial paralysis. Many of these suits allege not only that Levaquin is a defective medical product, but that J&J knew about this while it was marketing the drug to doctors, and intentionally failed to warn doctors about the risks of neuropathy to their patients. Continue reading

|

At this stage, more than 5,000 lawsuits have been filed against the iconic baby powder manufacturer Johnson & Johnson, most alleging that cases of ovarian cancer and mesothelioma were caused by asbestos contained in the pharmaceutical giant’s baby powder & talc products.

There is even a new shareholder lawsuit that was filed February 9 in federal court in New Jersey, on behalf of investors who purchased J&J shares between February 2013 and February 2018—alleging that J&J “has known for decades that its talc products, such as its Baby Powder, include asbestos fibers and that the exposure to those fibers can cause ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.” The tentative class action suit alleges that J&J harmed its stockholders by allegedly concealing the truth claimed in hundreds of other lawsuits and articles contending J&J’s talcum powder products contain asbestos.

Seems even investors are smelling something suspicious here. The investor suit, filed by one Frank Hall, named J&J as defendant along with J&J CEO Alex Gorsky and J&J CFO Dominic Caruso.

Continue reading

|

As many people have read or heard in the past few months, a rapidly growing number of cases have been filed by women who have contracted ovarian, uterine and vaginal cancers that they claim were caused by an ordinary, everyday item found in almost all homes in the United States:  Talcum powder (“talc”), or baby powder.

In August, a jury in Los Angeles found Johnson & Johnson (one of largest companies and most famous names in over the counter health products,) liable for a woman’s ovarian cancer.  The jury ordered that J&J pay a record $417 million in damages to the victim, Eva Echeverria.

The verdict marked the highest sum that a jury has awarded so far in a series of talcum powder cases against Johnson & Johnson in courts throughout the U.S.  The plaintiff in this case, as in other cases around the U.S., alleged that Johnson & Johnson did not adequately warn consumers about the cancer risks that were connected with the use of talcum powder. The plaintiff in the California case testified that she applied the giant company’s baby powder daily, for decades beginning in the 1950s.  She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2007, and claimed that she developed ovarian cancer as a ‘‘proximate result of the unreasonably dangerous and defective nature of talcum powder.” Continue reading

|

In my previous post on this subject, I discussed how a dedicated Boston anesthesiologist by the name of Amy Reed, a wife and mother of six, died due to uterine cancer spread by a medical device known as a power morcellator.  These new surgical devices were thought to offer a superior method over conventional surgery, in removing uterine and ovarian cysts.  The medical term for such procedures is laparoscopic uterine hysterectomy and myomectomy.

Tragically, power morcellation, as it came to be known, wasn’t a superior method to treat these conditions. Continue reading