A judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a Stratford, Connecticut woman against the cosmetics firm L’Oreal, saying she hadn’t proven her contention that the company had put dark brown dye in a box labeled as blonde. “I can never go back to my natural blonde hair,” complained Charlotte Feeney, who said that she ended up going on medications for depression as well as wearing hats. “I feel fake about that. Also blondes do get more attention than brunettes, of course, emotionally, I miss that.” (Daniel Tepfer, “Woman sues over wrong hair color”, Connecticut Post, Oct. 7)(via ABA Journal).

Gary Charbonneau had a gambling history, including substantial wins, which devolved into compulsive gambling in 2002. He blames this on his Parkinson’s disease medication, Mirapex, which he started taking in 1997. Mirapex changed its warning label to include reports of a correlation while Charbonneau was taking the drug; Charbonneau’s doctor kept prescribing the drug. Nevertheless, Charbonneau was able to persuade a jury that the failure to warn was what was responsible for his $200,000 gambling losses (much of which came from gambling illegally) and resulting marital troubles. The jury verdict even awarded $8 million in punitive damages, giving a whole new meaning to jackpot justice (though one would expect the trial court to reduce this substantially). The only press coverage of this lawsuit, aside from a handful of blogs (Pharmalot; TortsProf; InjuryBoard), is in an op-ed I wrote for today’s Examiner about the case and about how a Supreme Court case and Congressional legislation could affect it. (Theodore H. Frank, “Jackpot justice gets new meaning,” DC Examiner, Aug. 19).

Tim Sandefur asks this only half-facetiously as he reviews mass torts. Of course, as a must-read comment letter to FASB (via the indispensable Beck/Herrmann) submitted by six pharmaceutical companies notes, “A mass tort occurs when the plaintiffs’ bar decides to invest in it.”

The nurse gave the child at least twice as much as the dosage was supposed to be. “Plaintiffs sued everyone in sight” including the manufacturer of the little medicine cup. Would redesigning the little graduated markings on the cup have made a difference? (Beck & Herrmann, Drug & Device Law Blog, Jul. 30).

When meter maid Mercy Zamora’s cart crashed, she was injured — with such serious and permanent injuries, testified her husband, that she could no longer engage in strenuous or demanding physical activities. Then a defense lawyer introduced a photo showing Zamora with arms thrown over her head in triumph after completing a 10-kilometer race. If you think that spelled an ignominious end to the case, you must be a new reader here: the jury nonetheless “awarded about $1.6 million against Cushman Inc., maker of the cart Zamora was driving, and employer city of San Francisco, which had already settled out.” (Scott Graham, CalLaw “Legal Pad”, Jul. 22; CJAC, Jul. 24).

As Michael Krauss notes, an AP story today rehashes the details of last week’s Flax v. Chrysler case, though it falsely treats Paul Sheridan as a credible witness and doesn’t acknowledge most of Chrysler’s arguments.

It’s worth noting the Jim Butler firm’s description of the case:

The evidence showed the impact was minor. Though Stockell was speeding at the time, the minivan was also moving forward and the change in velocity (Delta V) was only 17 to 20 mph.

To repeat: the plaintiffs’ attorney said that a Delta-V of 17-20 mph is “minor.” I suppose in the astronomical sense that a Delta-V of 17-20 mph wouldn’t escape earth orbit, but it seems fairly major for someone in a heavy minivan. For those of you at home who want to experience what a “minor” Delta-V collision of “only” 17-20 mph feels like, drive into a reinforced brick wall at 17-20 mph with your airbag turned off, but be sure to wear your seat-belt to reduce the chance that you go through your windshield. Another way you can have a Delta-V of 20 mph is if you are dropped about 12-15 feet onto a concrete surface. I sure hope that the trial judge didn’t let Butler lie about physics to the jury like that, but I fear I know the answer.

Perhaps we spoke too soon when we commended the Tennessee appellate court for getting it partially right. As we stated in November 2004:

In 2001, Louis Stockell, driving his pickup at 70 mph, twice the speed limit, rear-ended a Chrysler minivan. Physics being what they are, the front passenger seat in the van collapsed backwards and the passenger’s head struck and fatally injured 8-month old Joshua Flax. The rest of the family walked away from the horrific accident. Plaintiffs’ attorney Jim Butler argued that Chrysler, which already designed its seats above federal standards, should be punished for not making the seats stronger — never mind that a stronger and stiffer seat would result in more injuries from other kinds of crashes because it wouldn’t absorb any energy from the crash. (Rear-end collisions are responsible for only 3% of auto fatalities.) Apparently car companies are expected to anticipate which type of crash a particular vehicle will encounter, and design accordingly. The $105M verdict includes $98M in punitives.

We had more details of trial shenanigans in December 2004 and noted the reduction of the punitives by the trial court to a still unreasonable $20 million in June 2005. In December 2006, the intermediate appellate court threw out the punitive damages and the negligent infliction of emotional distress claim, leaving a $5 million compensatory damages verdict to be split between Chrysler and the driver responsible for the accident. An injustice, but at least a smaller injustice.

However, today, a 3-2 vote of the Tennessee Supreme Court made it a larger injustice again, reinstating $13,367,345 of punitive damages over a good-faith dispute over appropriate seatback design, giving no credit to evidence that the design in the Caravan was safer than the plaintiffs’ proposed design, and effectively disregarding Tennessee statutory law that compliance with federal standards creates a presumption against punitive damages. The Court did not mention Exxon Shipping’s suggestion that punitive damages greater than a 1:1 ratio were possibly constitutionally inappropriate where compensatory damages were substantial and the defendant’s actions were not intentional or done for profit. The Court unanimously affirmed the elimination of the NIED claim; one justice would have thrown out the compensatory damages, as well, because of the volume of inadmissible and improperly prejudicial evidence admitted. (Flax v. Daimler Chrysler (Tenn. Jul. 24, 2008); id. (Wade, J., concurring); id. (Clark, J., partially dissenting); id. (Koch, J., partially dissenting); E. Thomas Wood, “High court upholds $18.4M damage award in DaimlerChrysler case”, Nashville Post, Jul. 24; Kristin M. Hall, AP/Chicago Tribune, Jul. 24). The majority decision relied heavily on the expert testimony of Paul Sheridan, an MBA non-engineer and professional anti-Chrysler witness whom a federal court called “wholly unqualified” to testify on seat back design.

On November 14, 1999, high-school dropout Rolando Domingo Montez, celebrating his 19th birthday, was arrested for public intoxication and trespass after the owner of the boat on which he and his friends were sitting complained. Police placed him in Cell No. 1 of the Port Isabel City Jail. The next morning, Montez was permitted to make some collect calls from his jail cell to seek bail money from his mother, Pearl Iris Garza. Mom, complaining that Montez was in jail again, refused. But she generously came to pick up Montez on the 16th when he was released on his own recognizance. Unfortunately, while Garza was waiting in the lobby, and while police were responding to a call for assistance regarding a suspicious vehicle, Montez hung himself with the 19-inch phone cord from the phone he had used to make the calls.

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The manual for the L120 John Deere mower reads:

DANGER: ROTATING BLADES CUT OFF ARMS AND LEGS

· Do not mow when children or others are around.

· Do not mow in reverse.

· Look down and behind before and while backing.

· Never carry children even with blades off.

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I’m quoted by Amanda Erickson in today’s Chicago Tribune:

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In autos; FDA; media bias; politics; preemption; product liability; Public Citizen; publicity; rollover litigation; Ted Frank

Once plaintiffs’ lawyers attracted potential asbestos plaintiffs, they had to convert them into actual plaintiffs. This “production” process is at the heart of the overall asbestos litigation scam. As noted, the screenings typically occurred in vans or trailers in parking lots. The procedures inside were laughable:

Inside the trailers, screeners took “occupational exposure histories” (which were necessary to link plaintiffs to asbestos defendants), conducted breathing tests, and took X-rays that were later analyzed by medical specialists known as “B readers.” People with little or no medical training ran the screening clinics: high school students or clerical workers took patient histories, a crucial procedure in diagnosing lung disease. Glorified clerks composed the diagnoses and “signed” them with rubber stamps.

The evidence is overwhelming that these screenings were largely shams designed to identify as many individuals as possible as “impaired” with asbestos-related injury. The plaintiffs’ lawyers only employed 4 to 6 percent of the nation’s certified B-readers. Some were employed in staggering mass-production fashion: one doctor diagnosed some 88,000 patients, conducting 150 asbestos X-ray readings per day. Unsurprisingly, many of the doctors who were most employed by the asbestos litigation machine later disavowed their diagnoses under oath or pleaded their Fifth Amendment-right against self-incrimination.

Just how stacked were the screenings in favor of finding a positive diagnosis of injury? A study employing independent readers conducted by Johns Hopkins researchers looked at 492 X-rays processed by the screening clinics and found lung impairment in 4.5 percent of cases; the lawyers’ B-readers had identified asbestos-related injury in 95.9 percent of the exact same films.

While the fraud involved in asbestos screenings was fairly well known among those in the know, and had been documented extensively by Professor Lester Brickman (see, e.g., here), the real public break in exposing the fraud came in federal court in 2005, when Texas judge Janis Graham Jack documented on the record massive fraud in the silicosis cases before her court. Regular readers of Overlawyered and Point of Law are familiar with Judge Jack’s basic findings (see here), so I’ll only go over the high points. (Interested readers can refer to the pertinent section of the Trial Lawyers, Inc.: Asbestos report for more detail.)

In essence, Judge Jack discovered (through the diligent work of the defendant’s law firm) that most of the silicosis claims before here were filed on behalf of individuals who had already been paid for asbestosis. While medically possible, mutual occurrence of both diseases is highly unlikely; and the medical diagnosis of X-ray readings makes distinguishing between the 2 injuries rather easy, as “scars that asbestos causes look like threads, while the scars that silica causes look like BBs.” Dr. George Martindale, a doctor who had processed thousands of claims before Judge Jack, admitted that the language in his “reports” that formed the basis for the litigation came from the lawyers and screening companies, and he denied that they were actual diagnoses. Judge Jack held full hearings under the rules established by Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals and its progeny, and issued a comprehensive — and withering — 249-page decision:

These diagnoses were about litigation rather than health care. And yet that statement, while true, overestimates the motives of the people who engineered them…. [T]ruth and justice had very little to do with these diagnoses. Instead, these diagnoses were driven by neither health nor justice; they were manufactured for money. The record is not clear who originally devised this scheme, but it is clear that the lawyers, doctors and screening companies were all willing participants.

Since Judge Jack’s ruling, other scandals involving mass asbestos screenings have emerged, which I’ll document in due course. The key take-away from a broad litigation context is just how much difficulty U.S. courts have in dealing with complex medical evidence. Federal courts have improved significantly since Peter Huber wrote Galileo’s Revenge, in no small part due to Daubert and the cases that followed, but many state courts lack the procedural protections — or competence — that their federal brethren possess in handling these issues. Indeed, had Judge Jack not been a former nurse, she herself may not have been able to interpret the fraud before her. In mass tort cases, of course, handling the scientific evidence becomes all but impossible, as I’ll discuss next.

With Walter occupied on a deadline and Ted on the road, I’m happy to be back to wrap up my discussion of developments in asbestos litigation, as summarized in the Manhattan Institute’s recently released Trial Lawyers, Inc.: Asbestos report. As I noted last month, asbestos has an ancient history, and in the early part of the last century, it was deemed a “magic mineral”; its flame-retardant properties protected American naval vessels and schoolhouses from fire. (See here.) Unfortunately, asbestos exposure ultimately proved deadly, the plaintiffs’ lawyers pounced, and the American asbestos industry largely went bankrupt by the early 1980s. (See here.) The trusts created to pay out claimants from these bankrupt entities became a big business unto themselves, swamped with claimants and unable fairly or efficiently to process the claims. (See here.)

 What happened next, in the 1990s and early part of this decade, amounts in large part to the systemization of fraud, through a business model the trial lawyers developed to extract as much money as possible out of the asbestos well. As we point out in our Trial Lawyers, Inc. report, this business model “starts with marketing (recruiting plaintiffs), followed by production (eagerly screening prospective plaintiffs for purported lung impairment and usually finding it), packaging (bundling cases into a “mass” of tort claims), and sales (overwhelming courts and defendants to extract settlements).” At each stage of the process, the business exemplifies major problems with American jurisprudence. I’ll start with marketing.

Lawyers’ ability to “market” for clients is founded in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona, which determined that attorney advertising is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. That ruling may well have been right as a matter of constitutional law, but it effectively gutted prohibitions on attorney solitication of clients and led to attorney-driven litigation. In the asbestos context, solicitation of clients became truly laughable, as ne’er-do-wells attracted potential plaintiffs to screening vans parked outside union halls or strip malls:

Heath Mason, a junior-college dropout with no legal or medical training who made $25.5 million from asbestos litigation. Mason’s role was attracting potential plaintiffs to “screening clinics” that interviewed and “tested” them, usually in trailers hauled to restaurant, shopping-center, or motel parking lots. Mason would lure passersby with attractive women he called his “lawyer girls,” such as the two young lawyers he met at an unidentified convention in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and later persuaded to stand on a Fort Worth street corner with signs directing potential plaintiffs to an X-ray screening van in a Staples parking lot.

Today, marketing tactics are also of the sophisticated variety. As Overlawyered readers are aware, the most expensive Google ad-search terms involve “asbestos” and “mesothelioma.”

Few battlegrounds of legal reform have been harder-fought than that in the state of Michigan, where I grew up. On the plus side, the Wolverine State has seen three rounds of legislatively enacted litigation reform, along with the appointment by former Gov. John Engler of probably the most reform-minded state supreme court majority in the nation. On the minus side, trial lawyer interests have long been key players in state politics, often practicing a bare-knuckled brand of advocacy, and the career of colorful (and recently acquitted) Geoffrey Fieger of Southfield, arguably the Midwest’s most prominent trial attorney, is virtually a synonym for waywardness in the courtroom and out.

Now the Manhattan Institute’s Trial Lawyers Inc. series, under the able direction of Jim Copland, has published a new installment taking a look at the state’s tense legal politics. Trial lawyers are expected to work hard this year to knock off reformist Supreme Court Justice Clifford Taylor at the polls, and are also engaged in an all-out push to repeal the state’s one-of-a-kind law directing its courts in liability cases not to second-guess Food and Drug Administration determinations on pharmaceutical approval and marketing. To get up to speed on these issues and more, start here. (cross-posted from Point of Law).

AP reports a Texas court has thrown out the infamous Ernst $26 million judgment; a New Jersey court has tossed $9 million of the judgment in McDarby. More details on Point of Law as available.

Ernst was the first Vioxx suit to go to trial. A jury awarded $253 million. Mark Lanier waited months before asking for a final judgment; at the time, I suggested that this was because he knew the case would be reversed on appeal, and did not want the bad publicity. Indeed, the appellate decision perhaps comes too late for Merck: the number of lawsuits increased from 6000 to 60000 in the months following publicity over the jury verdict, costing Merck billions of dollars in the later extortionate settlement.

With these two decisions, only three plaintiffs’ verdicts in favor of Merck remain.

Update: I still haven’t seen the McDarby decision, but an updated AP story indicates that it upheld the compensatory damages of $4.5 million, overturned the $9 million punitive damages verdict, and overturned the consumer-fraud judgment (which also saves Merck millions of dollars in plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees).

The legal kitty for the Rhode Island nightclub fire now exceeds $100 million, bolstered by earlier settlements from such entities as Clear Channel Broadcasting and Home Depot, among at least 93 defendants in all. (Eric Tucker, AP/Boston Globe, May 13; earlier).

Asbestos litigation has been around a long time. Early on, nothing like modern product liability law existed (see Richard Epstein’s discussion here); lawsuits resided in workplace injury law when filed in the 1920s and 30s, and were soon subsumed in workers compensation reforms.

Modern asbestos litigation began after the Selikoff study was published in 1964. In December 1965, Texas attorney Ward Stephenson filed a case on behalf of Claude Tomplait, who had worked as an asbestos insulator. Four years later, Stephenson extracted a settlement for $75,000 from seven defendants.

Notwithstanding this meager beginning, Stephenson persisted in asbestos litigation and won a major victory in Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp., 493 F.2d 1076 (1973), in which the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found asbestos manufacturers strictly liable for their workers’ injuries. The Borel court rejected statute of limitations, contributory negligence, and assumption of risk defenses; and modern asbestos product liability litigation was born.

The litigation got another shot in the arm when New Jersey attorney Karl Asch uncovered the “Sumner-Simpson papers,” which “described in great detail the efforts of Raybestos, Johns-Manville, and other manufacturers to find out about the hazards of asbestos, develop strategies to deal with them, and–most important–to keep that knowledge from the public and workers.” These documents were put to great effect by South Carolina lawyer Ron Motley, who actually used the papers to convince a South Carolina circuit judge to grant a new trial after a jury had ruled in favor of asbestos defendants. Motley of course went on to become an asbestos super-lawyer and an architect of the multibillion-dollar multistate tobacco settlement; his antics are well-known to long-time readers of this site.

Two more foundational cases are worthy of mention. In 1981, the D.C. Circuit ruled that insurers who had written asbestos policies were liable for the maximum insured between exposure and diagnosis, rather than only in the year of diagnosis. See Keene Corp. v Insurance Co. of North America, 667 F.2d 1034 (D.C. Cir. 1981). Given the long latency between asbestos exposure and ultimate illness, the level of insurance exposure was suddenly massive. Circuit Judge Patricia Wald warned that the court’s decision “requires a leap of logic from existing precedent, for it concerns diseases about which there is no medical certainty as to precisely how or when they occur.”

In 1982, the New Jersey Supreme Court threw out the “state of the art” defense for asbestos manufacturers, in essence holding that it mattered not whether business practice was the best available to the industry at the time the injury occurred. See Beshada v. Johns-Manville Products Corp., 442 A.2d 539 (N.J. 1982). The court opined, “The burden of illness from dangerous products such as asbestos should be placed upon those who profit from its production and, more generally, upon society at large which reaps the benefits of the various products our economy manufactures. ”

Thus, in less than a decade, the law was radically shifted, and asbestos litigation was born: “The decade after Borel saw 25,000 asbestos cases filed. By 1981, more than 200 companies and insurers had been sued; by 1982, defendants’ costs had topped $1 billion.” But these early years were just the beginning…

Yesterday the Manhattan Institute released a new report by my colleague Jim Copland, “Trial Lawyers Inc. — Asbestos“. As I note at Point of Law, even as a longtime observer of asbestos litigation I found it quite an eye-opener. I’m happy to announce that Jim Copland will be joining us tomorrow for a guestblogging stint to explain some of his findings.

One of the justifications for FDA preemption is the fear of overwarning; warning overload can be counterproductive, causing people to ignore important warnings. Thus, failure-to-warn litigation impedes safety. See “Requirements on Content and Format of Labeling for Human Prescription Drug and Biological Products,” 71 Fed. Reg. 3922 (Jan. 24, 2006); Larkin v. Pfizer, Inc., 153 S.W.3d 758, 764 (Ky. 2004).

Further evidence comes from a CNNMoney.com report (Aaron Smith, “Consumers tune out FDA warnings”, Feb. 25) suggesting that the FDA’s post-Vioxx caution has already caused the agency to be at the point of diminishing returns, as it is averaging 50% more safety alerts a year for 2005-2007 than it did in 2004, the year Vioxx was withdrawn from the market.

I discussed overwarning in other contexts on Overlawyered in Sep. 2006.