Practice Tip

Over the past decade, plaintiffs have stepped up their assaults on federal diversity jurisdiction in pharmaceutical and medical device litigation. Along with their efforts to chip away at the learned intermediary doctrine, plaintiffs increasingly are attempting to join local sales representatives fraudulently in order to defeat diversity. Moreover, plaintiffs have not been shy about their intentions: “To avoid removal to federal court in cases where it is deemed advisable to do so, a wise strategy for a plaintiff in a personal injury case is to look for a valid claim against a local party in the forum in which the plaintiff seeks to file the claim.” See Michael L. Williams & John Waldman, Parties, in 1 ATLA's LITIGATING TORT CASES '5:33 (Roxanne Barton Conlin & Gregary S. Cusimano eds., 2003) and David S. Casey, Jr. & Jeremy Robinson, Removal to Federal Court, in 1 ATLA's LITIGATING TORT CASES '7:6 (Roxanne Barton Conlin & Gregary S. Cusimano eds., 2003). In recent years, many plaintiffs have not been so concerned with “valid” claims and, instead, have named local parties against whom they have no legitimate claims.