We are back in the trenches today after spending a wonderful day in New York with our lifelong best friend, in yet another of the blissfully endless celebrations of the milestone birthday we marked in December. We saw "The Band's Visit," a new musical based on a 2007 movie about eight members of an Egyptian police orchestra stranded overnight in a remote Israeli town. The band members accept a local resident's invitation to bunk overnight in her café, setting the stage for lovely intersections of hearts, minds, and cultures. It is short, sweet, and very satisfying.
As is today's case, for those of us who defend prescription drug and device manufacturers. In Kwasniewski v. Sanofi-Aventis, LLC, 2018 WL 1567851 (D. Nev. Mar. 30, 2018), the plaintiffs alleged that the defendant's prescription sleep medication caused their decedent to commit suicide. The opinion includes the judge's decisions on objections to several earlier rulings by the magistrate judge and her decision on the defendant's motion to dismiss the plaintiffs' design defect claims.
Objections to Magistrate's Rulings
First, the plaintiffs objected to the magistrate's refusal to stay discovery – and relieve the plaintiffs of their obligation to respond to the defendant's pending discovery requests – while the defendant's Motion to Dismiss was pending. The court agreed with the magistrate, emphasizing that "[t]he Federal Rules of Civil Procedure do not provide for automatic or blanket stays of discovery when a potentially dispositive motion is pending." Kwasniewski, 2018 WL 1567851 at *2.
Second, the plaintiffs objected to the magistrate's application of Nevada's learned intermediary doctrine. In a 30(b)(6) deposition notice, the plaintiffs included topics concerning "information about direct to consumer advertising." Because, under the learned intermediary doctrine, the defendant had a duty to warn only "medical experts, not consumers, about the dangers of [its prescription drug]," id. at *4, the magistrate ruled that deposition testimony about direct-to-consumer advertising was irrelevant. As such, she limited the plaintiffs' Rule 30(b)(6) deposition topics to the defendant's "representations to the medical community." The plaintiffs argued that the magistrate had "effectively decided a dispositive motion" by applying the learned intermediary doctrine, and that the doctrine was an affirmative defense that had not yet been pled. The court again affirmed the magistrate and barred the plaintiffs from discovering information that the defendant had disseminated directly to consumers. We like this ruling and applaud the court's adherence to the standard imposed by Fed. R. Civ. P. 26, requiring discovery to be "relevant to [a] party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case," and its refusal to sanction a meaningless and abusive fishing expedition.
Defendant's Motion to Dismiss
The defendant moved to dismiss the plaintiffs' design defect claims sounding in both strict liability and negligence, arguing that "any claim that [the defendant] should have changed the formulation of [the product] or that the product should simply not have been marketed are preempted by Federal Law." Id. at *5. In their response, the plaintiffs conceded that they were "not arguing that that [the defendant] should have reformulated the drug – just simply that [the defendant] should have" included adequate warnings of the drugs alleged suicidality risk. Id. As such, the court was able to grant the defendant's motion, and foreclose the plaintiff's from alleging a design defect claim at a later date, without addressing the preemption argument.. (Given this court's clear-headed, correct-leaning rulings, we suspect that its preemption decision would have been fun to read.)
Kwasniewski is a tidy, no-nonsense, defense-friendly opinion.. If, on this beautiful spring day, we are confined to an office and not roaming the Great White Way, we are pleased that this case crossed our desk.
This article is presented for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal advice.
