Recent rulings of interest to you and your practice.

Features

Recently, two federal courts rejected certification in three putative "medical monitoring" class actions that were brought against E.I. DuPont de Nemours and Company in West Virginia and New Jersey. These are significant rulings in the still developing field of "medical monitoring," and indicate the limits of class certification based on medical monitoring theories of recovery

Features

Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure incentivizes a party's attorney to get creative in his efforts to prevent disclosure of his communications with the party's expert ... The results of the rule have been costly and often lead to the discovery of information that is only marginally relevant to any genuine issue in dispute.

In March, an Atlantic County, NJ, judge denied a request to certify a class action against Merck & Co. on behalf of consumers for their out-of-pocket expenses for the painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market in 2004 after a medical study linked it to heart disease.

This article poses ten questions in-house corporate counsel should ask themselves when they are preparing to defend a case and are in the process of retaining outside counsel.

The increased regulation of safety standards, testing, certifications of compliance, and advertising will likely result in a significant increase in the number of foreign product recalls. This, in turn, will yield increased litigation in the future. Here's why.

Former employees of Heller Ehrman sued at least 179 former partners in April, demanding they fork over $32 million for the largest group of creditors in the defunct firm's bankruptcy.

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Management teams should be aware that reductions in workforce ("RIFs"), while seemingly cost-cutting in nature, can actually yield the opposite result, and can cause unintended and costly consequences with respect to a firm's tax-qualified employee benefit plan.