Justia California Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Plaintiff filed suit against Bard, manufacturer and seller of polypropylene mesh kits, for personal injuries, and plaintiff's husband sought damages for loss of consortium. A jury found Bard was negligent and awarded $5.5 million in damages. The jury also found that plaintiff's surgeon, a nonparty, was 40 percent at fault and the trial court reduced the award accordingly. The court concluded that the jury was properly instructed on the theory of negligent design, negligent training, and negligent misrepresentation; substantial evidence supported the negligence verdict; and Bard was not denied a fair trial. The court rejected plaintiffs' argument that it was necessary to instruct the jury on medical professional negligence to support the apportionment and, because the jury was not so instructed, the trial court erred in reducing the damages. Plaintiffs acquiesced in the giving of incomplete jury instructions on the surgeon's fault when it was in their best interest for the jury to be properly instructed on that issue. Consequently, plaintiffs are estopped from asserting this instructional error on appeal. The court affirmed the judgment.View "Scott v. C.R. Bard, Inc." on Justia Law

Hardin suffered complete blindness and permanent, severe and painful scarring after she took Lamotrigine, the generic form of the medication Lamictal. Hardin sued the prescribing physician, the manufacturer, the store where she bought the prescription (Safeway), WKH, which produced the drug information pamphlet (monograph), and PDX, a software provider that distributes drug information to pharmacy customers. Unlike physician package inserts and patient medication guides, which are FDA-mandated, WKH monographs are not regulated or reviewed by the FDA, but are produced as part of a self-regulating action plan required under 110 Stat. 1593. The WKH monograph was the only information received by Hardin when she first filled her prescription for Lamictal. The abbreviated warning used by Safeway and provided to Hardin omitted the “Black Box” warning: “BEFORE USING THIS MEDICINE” that stated: “SERIOUS AND SOMETIMES FATAL RASHES HAVE OCCURRED RARELY WITH THE USE OF THIS MEDICINE. Hardin says that had she been provided this warning, she would not have taken the medication. WKH moved to strike Hardin’s claims against it under Code of Civil Procedure section 425.16, the “anti-SLAPP” (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation ) statute.. The trial court ruled that WKH’s production of drug monographs was protected speech concerning a public issue or an issue of public interest and that Hardin had no probability of prevailing because she could not establish that WKH owed her any duty. The court denied PDX’s motion to strike, finding that the activity underlying PDX’s alleged liability was the reprogramming of its software to permit Safeway to give customers an abbreviated, five-section monograph that omitted warnings instead of the full eight-section version that included those warnings. The court of appeal affirmed. View "Hardin v. PDX, Inc." on Justia Law