Congress created the National Practitioners Data Bank in 1986, passing a piece of legislation whose mission entailed improving the quality of healthcare, reducing abuse and fraud and protecting the public. A vast online repository, it includes information about adverse actions by practitioners and medical-malpractice payments from lawsuits. “…it is a […]
Search Results: discovery
Should defendants be permitted to adopt a policy concerning employee use of personal computing devices in business that benefits the defendant and then hide behind that policy to its benefit in the discovery process of a lawsuit? An essential organization in the modern discovery process, The Sedona Conference, has […]
Patient Access to Adverse-Incident Reports Threatened Florida’s Constitution Revision Commission has on its 2018 agenda a proposal to amend a provision that gives parties in medical-malpractice lawsuits access to adverse-incident reports that can make or break cases. The proposal, made by Commissioner Tim Cerio, seeks to limit such access for […]
The next hearing session of the United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation is scheduled for November 30, 2017 in St. Louis, Missouri. Eight matters are set for oral argument to consider motions to transfer each to one centralized district for coordinated pretrial proceedings. The matters include trending issues such […]
Federal Rules were last updated in 2016 and the changes were thought to be significant. Welcomed by some and scorned by others, those changes are still being evaluated and applied by judges across the country. The Sedona Conference has drafted a primer for FRCP 34. Like revisions to the federal […]
In April of 2016, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, a panel who determines whether to coordinate federal court lawsuits into multidistrict litigation (MDL), centralized lawsuits involving men who developed melanoma after ingesting Viagra. This MDL was established in San Francisco federal court before Judge Seeborg and styled as In […]
The FDA announced a recall of Zimmer Biomet’s SpF PLUS Mini and SpF XL IIb implantable spinal fusion stimulators. This is due to the high levels of potentially harmful chemicals that are potentially harmful to tissues and organs (cytotoxicity). The recall of the implantable device affects certain serial numbers that […]
On August 29, 2016, Stryker issued a voluntary recall of certain lots of Stryker LFit Anatomic Cobalt Chromium V40 femoral heads, a prosthetic hip replacement device, manufactured before March 2011. This recall included over 40,000 defective hips. Stryker cited to “higher than expected” complaints about the failure of the femoral […]
The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (“JPML” or “The Panel”) is a body of seven federal district judges who manage multidistrict litigation, meeting on a bimonthly basis to consider requests to establish MDLs. The Panel has the authority to determine whether civil actions pending in two or more federal […]
According to a bill pending in the House of representatives, class actions are bad for you and multi-district litigation is not your friend. HR 985 is an example of our legislators acting out of complete ignorance or an effort to pay back big contributors like corporations and insurance companies. If […]