News

[New Orleans] -- The Plaintiffs' Steering Committee (PSC) spearheading the litigation surrounding the 2010 BP Gulf Oil Spill today announced that a settlement in principle has been reached with BP that will fully compensate hundreds of thousands of victims of the tragedy.

Few people realize that the vast majority of lawsuits – between 95 and 98% – never go before a judge and jury.

In most cases, lawyers on both sides of an injury lawsuit are able to reach a settlement before going to trial. In fact, both sides will go to great lengths to achieve a settlement. Court trials are long, drawn-out, expensive, difficult and often messy. They can generate a lot of unwanted publicity for the defendant (the party being sued).

Two years after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, a few communities along the US southern coast are anticipating a banner year for Gulf Coast tourism, if upward trends from last year continue. In fact, the most serious problem facing at least one Gulf Coast tourism community is a shortage of hotel and restaurant workers. Just over the state line in Baldwin County, Alabama, one official was quoted in a local paper, saying that:

In February,2012 I blogged about a Spanish company that was drilling a deepwater exploratory oil well 30 miles north of Cuba and just 70 miles south of the Florida Keys. view blog here. I expressed concern because the rig was drilling in water 6500 feet deep which is 1500 feet deeper than the water the Deepwater Horizon was drilling in at the time it was destroyed in 2010 causing the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

We’ve had recent posts connecting the failure of ASR hip implants and cancer.  According to a study in Finland as well as a report in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), there were strong indications of a link between lymphoma and leukemia a decade after the hip implant was implanted. The findings in the Finnish study suggested that the risk of cancer to such patients may be as much as 300% higher than that of the general population.

New information came to light indicating that DePuy was fully aware of the defects of its ASR hip implants before the FDA requested additional data on the abnormally high failure rates of its product. The hip replacement recall of the ASR hip implants came shortly after  DePuy received a communication from the FDA refusing approval of the device and requesting additional information on the implant's failure.

Levin, Papantonio shareholder Tim O'Brien informs the Fosamax Examiner that closing arguments are set for Tuesday, April 17, in the New Jersey Fosamax bellwether trial in the case of Jo Ann Sessner vs. Merck & Co.. The case involves the claim of a Florida Fosamax patient who developed Stage 3 bisphosphonate-related osteonecrosis of the jaw after more than six years of Fosamax use.

Not me! It wasn't me!” It's a statement you expect out of a small child who is confronted over a broken vase or or other damage and the evidence overwhelmingly points to him.

This story isn't exactly new – it came out in the wake of an American Diabetes Association  conference in San Diego in the summer of 2011 – but even now, several months later, relatively few people are aware of it.

The law firm of Levin, Papantonio, et al. finds it interesting that Johnson & Johnson execs began phasing out the DePuy ASR hip implant in 2009, mere weeks after the F.D.A. sent the company a request for additional safety data on the implant, according to New York Times article, “Hip Device Phaseout Followed F.D.A. Data Request.” It seems the F.D.A.

It's a sad and all-too common story, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry. They know there is a risk or potentially dangerous side effect to one of their profitable products and they don't yank it off the market (at least until they are forced to – either for legal or economic reasons). Instead, the company's bean counters crunch some numbers and decide how much a few legal settlements would cost versus how much profits would suffer if the product was recalled or the problem addressed.