Someone had been buying just about all of the advertising space on Google for most of the search terms relating to the recent Ernst v. Merck case with the headline “$250,000,000 Vioxx award,” (or, even more inaccurately, “$250,000,000 Vioxx settlement”) so I decided to see what new schemes the Internet had cooked up for chasing clients. The result is this page, which offers to “refer your Vioxx case” to “Mark Lanier law firm” to review.
The most entertaining part of the site is that there are eight check-boxes to describe the plaintiff’s symptoms, presumably so that lawyers can easily evaluate the submitted case:
Patient had Heart Attack
Patient had a Stroke
Patient had other Heart Problems
Patient Passed Away/Deceased
Patient had Unstable Angina
Patient had a Pulmonary Embolism
Patient had Arterial Thrombosis
Patient had Transient Ischemic Attack
Note the utter absence of an “arrhythmia” checkbox that would describe Robert Ernst’s symptoms, though hundreds of thousands of people suffer fatal arrthymias every year. On the other hand, given the fourth check-box, perhaps Vioxx plaintiffs’ attorneys plan to sue on behalf of everyone who took Vioxx, and then died. If they wait long enough, that will eventually be all of them. Earlier Vioxx ads/spam: Jan. 5; Dec. 22.
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