The Litigation Counsellor®

On January 26, 2009, Plaintiff Deborah Sohl, 47, presented to the emergency room of A.O. Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta, NY, complaining of severe chest pain which radiated to her left side, including her left arm, neck and jaw. She also reported feeling nauseous. An EKG was performed and the results were abnormal.

Formerly straight-A student, Megan Thode, sued her professor, Amanda Eckhardt, and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA after she received only a C+ in Eckhardt’s therapy internship class in 2009. She claimed the low grade not only cost her a master’s degree in education and her dream of becoming a licensed therapist, but also allegedly $1.3 million in future lost earnings. However, her lawsuit really wasn’t about the money—she just wanted a B in Eckhard’s class.

On January 7, 2013, Philadelphia Judge Nitza I. Quinones affirmed a $10 million jury verdict in favor of Plaintiff Brianna Maya for injuries she sustained after taking over-the-counter Children’s Motrin.

As the first DePuy ASR hip trial began in a California State Court in Los Angeles, Defendant, Johnson & Johnson (“J&J”) was reeling from the Food & Drug Administration’s proposal that manufacturers of metal-on-metal hip implants submit affirmative scientific evidence that the devices are safe and effective. Previously, manufacturers like J&J were allowed to market the implants under much less stringent guidelines that did not require submission of such safety and effectiveness data.

Chances are that if you are a woman and have visited Paris in your lifetime, you—and millions of other women like you—most certainly broke the law without even realizing it.

School administrators at the The Calhoun School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side fired Daniele Benatouil, a 12-year veteran French teacher, for allowing six 18-year-old seniors to drink a glass of wine during their school-sponsored trip to France.

The night of December 16, 2010 took a tragic turn for 13-year-old Rohayent Gomez Eriza when Police Officer Victor Abarca and his partner came across Eriza and his friends playing a game of cops and robbers with toy guns.

On December 6, 2012, a jury awarded $109 million in damages, the largest award in Allegheny County history, in a case involving a woman who died three days after being electrocuted by a fallen power line.

On July 15, 2006, 12-year-old little league pitcher Steven Domalewski was struck in the chest by a line drive from a Louisville Slugger TPX Platinum aluminum bat. Domalewski then went into cardiac arrest and was deprived of oxygen for 15 minutes. Although was resuscitated, Domalewski suffered permanent cognitive impairment and became confined to a wheelchair. Now, at age 19, he has impaired speech and is almost completely blind.

On November 16, 2008, Plaintiff James Von Normann, a 25-year-old salesman, was found laying in the parking lot of the Newport Channel Inn in Newport Beach, California. Paramedics found Plaintiff unresponsive with a score of nine on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which rates patients on a scale from 1-15 based on scores in three categories: eye opening response, verbal response and motor response. Patients with scores between two and eight are usually considered to be in a coma.¹ Plaintiff was transported to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana with a skull fracture and severe traumatic brain injuries. There, hospital physicians ordered a blood draw which revealed Plaintiff’s blood alcohol content to be .267 - more than three times the legal limit for driving while intoxicated.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, 131 S.Ct. 2541 (2011), ruled in a 5-4 decision that the certification of the nationwide class of female Wal-Mart employees was not consistent with Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(a), which requires the party seeking class certification to prove that the class has common questions of law or fact. In Dukes, Plaintiffs alleged Wal-Mart management discriminated against women over pay and promotions in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Supreme Court, however, de-certified the class because it determined that the female Wal-Mart employees, members of the largest class in U.S. history, did not share enough in common as plaintiffs to be granted class certification.

Can an employer lawfully terminate an employee simply for being irresistible? According to a December 21, 2012 decision from the Iowa Supreme Court, the answer appears to be “yes.”

On November 9, 2012, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court of Massachusetts' determination that Starbucks' shift supervisors had improperly shared in tips left at the counter for baristas at their numerous coffee shop locations.

On November 2, 2012 the FDA issued a Drug Safety Communication report update addressing the risk of serious bleeding among new users of Pradaxa. On its face, the FDA appeared to conclude that the rates for uncontrolled bleeding events among Pradaxa users were the same as other blood thinner medications, most notably warfarin (Coumadin). Thus headlines suggested the report was a critical blow to plaintiffs’ claims in the MDL pending before Judge David R. Herndon in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Illinois (MDL No. 2385, Pradaxa Product Liability Litigation). A closer look analysis reveals that this is not necessarily the case.