TORTINI

For your delectation and delight, desultory dicta on the law of delicts.

Lawsuit Magic – Turning Talcum into Wampum

August 27th, 2017

Last week, a Los Angeles jury, with little prior experience in giving away other people’s money, awarded Eva Echeverria $417,000,000 dollars, in compensatory and punitive damages.1 Pundits in the media, and from both sides of the bar, including your humble blogger, jumped in to offer their speculation about the cause of profligacy.2

In speaking to one reporter, I described the evidence against Johnson & Johnson in an earlier trial (Slemp) as showing that the company needed to engage more fully with the scientific evidence, and not reduce complex evidence to sound bites. Alas, no good deed goes unpunished; my comments were reduced to sound bites! The reporter quoted me in part as having said that the case was a tough one for the defense, but left out that I thought the case was tough because the defense will have a difficult time educating judges and juries in the scientific methods and judgment needed to reach a sound conclusion. The reporter suggested that I had opined that the evidence against J & J was “compelling,” when I had suggested the evidence was confounded and biased, and that J & J needed to take greater care in addressing study validity.3

Perhaps more interesting than my speculation is the guesswork of the plaintiffs’ counsel, who has had more experience with conjecture than I will ever enjoy. In an interview with an American Law Media reporter4, Allen Smith offered his view that three “new” pieces of evidence explain the Los Angeles hyper-verdict:

1. evidence that other companies selling consumer talcum power have begun to place ovarian cancer warnings on their packaging, within the few months;

2. evidence that two persons involved in the Cosmetic Industry Review, which has concluded that talcum powder is safe, had received payments from Johnson & Johnson for speaking engagements; and

3. evidence that Douglas Weed, a former National Cancer Institute epidemiologist, who testified for Johnson & Johnson as an expert witness in the Echeverria case, had been sanctioned in another, non-talc case in North Carolina, for lying under oath about whether he had notes to his expert report in that other case.

Smith claimed that the new evidence was “very compelling,” especially the evidence that Johnson & Johnson had presented “unbelievable and non-credible witnesses on an issue so important like this.”

Now, Smith was trial counsel. He was intimately involved in presenting the evidence, and in watching the jurors’ reactions. Nonetheless, I am skeptical that these three “bits” explain the jury’s extravagance.

The first “bit” seems completely irrelevant. The fact of another company’s having warned within months of the trial, and years after the plaintiff was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, suggests that the evidence was inflammatory without having any probative value. Feasibility of warning was not an issue. State of the art was an issue. In the Slemp trial, Graham Colditz testified that he had had his epiphany that talc causes ovarian cancer only two years ago, when he was instructed by plaintiffs’ counsel to formulate an opinion on the causal claim. That another company recently placed a warning to ward off the lawsuit industry is hardly evidence of industry or governmental standard. All that can really be said is that some companies have been bullied or scared into warnings by the Lawsuit Industry, in the hopes of avoiding litigation. Indeed, it is not at all clear how this bit of irrelevancy was admitted into evidence. All in all, this evidence of a recent warning, years after the plaintiff’s use of the defendant’s talcum powder seems quite out of bounds.

The second bit was simply more of the same inflammatory, scurrilous attacks on Johnson & Johnson. Having watched much of the Slemp trial, I can say that this was Allen Smith’s stock in trade. From media reports, he seemed to have succeeded in injecting his personal attacks on the most peripheral of issues into the Echeverria trial. Not everything in Slemp was collateral attack, but a lot was, and much of it was embarrassing to the legal system for having tolerated it.

The third bit of evidence about Dr. Weed’s having been sanctioned was news to me. A search on Westlaw and Google Scholar failed to find the sanctions order referred to by plaintiffs’ counsel. If anyone is familiar with the North Carolina case that gave rise to the alleged court sanction, please send me a copy or a citation.


1 Daniel Siegal, “J&J Hit With $417M Verdict In 1st Calif. Talc Cancer Trial,” Law360 (Aug. 21, 2017). The case was Echeverria v. Johnson & Johnson, case no. BC628228, Los Angeles Cty. Superior Court, California.

2 See Daniel Siegal, “Science No Salve For J&J In Talc Cases, $417M Verdict Shows,” Law360, Los Angeles (Aug. 22, 2017). See also Margaret Cronin Fisk & and Edvard Pettersson, “J&J Loses $417 Million Talc Verdict in First California Case,” Bloomberg News (Aug. 21, 2017).

3 Tina Bellon, “Massive California verdict expands J&J’s talc battlefield,” Reuters (Aug. 22, 2017); Tina Bellon, “Massive California verdict expands J&J’s talc battlefield,” CNBC (Aug. 22, 2017); Tina Bellon, “J&J’s talc woes expand with massive California verdict,” BNN Reuters (Aug. 22, 2017).

4 Amanda Bronstad, “New Evidence Seen as Key in LA Jury’s $417M Talc Verdict,” Law.com (Aug. 22, 2017).

Trial by Twitter

August 13th, 2017

Did you read Trump’s tweet from last night?

Time to take down the Statue of Liberty. Ugly dress, too French, heavy calves. Sad, must go.”

OK. I admit, I made that up, but it could have been true. Trumpovich has said more outrageous, stupider things, frequently and with wild abandon.

I don’t really understand this Twitter thing. What worse is that I do understand how it feeds uncritical thinking by people who prefer sound bite to argument and discourse. But we live in a democracy, and this is what people want; right? This is what the First Amendment requires?

So why not make American great again, and merge two great institutions together: the right to trial by jury with the right to express one’s self in mindless sound bites? Let us admit it: Twitter has blossomed because Americans have the attention span of crickets. And many have no more cognitive ability than crickets, to boot, but you go to trial with the jurors you have, not the jurors you want.

Here is how trial by twitter might work. A “fair and impartial,” but appropriately ignorant jury is selected for a trial that involves a scientific controversy, at least a controversy in the minds of the litigants and their hired expert witnesses. The jurors need not be inconvenienced by travel to the local court house; they need only have their smartphones available at all times. If they cannot afford a smartphone, one will be given to them. The lawyers will then start to tweet their opening statements, alternating tweets. Each side is allowed 100 tweets. In trials designated complex, each side gets 150 tweets.

Then come the witnesses. One at a time, first for plaintiff; then for defendant. Each witness is permitted to tweet his or her testimony, after first tweeting an oath to tweet the truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me. The witness is permitted two tweets, after which the opposing counsel is permitted to cross-tweet once. Opposing counsel may interpose an objection tweet, with the trial judge tweeting his or her ruling. If the objection is sustained, then the offending tweet will be deleted. The 2:1 tweets are repeated until the witness has nothing left to tweet. After each witness, legal counsel are permitted interim argument of 25 tweets each, alternating. In an effort to promote early settlements, jurors are permitted to “like” tweets from witnesses or counsel, at every stage.

Final arguments are tweeted, of course, again with alternating tweets. The tweeter with the burden of proof gets the final tweet, followed by the judge’s instructions, delivered in tweets. A jury foreperson is appointed, and deliberations proceed by twitter, marked private. Verdicts are returned by the foreperson’s tweet, with the other jurors’ tweeting their agreement, or dissents. Post-verdict motions and appeals can easily be handled by twitter, as well.

Due process preserved, and the right to trial inviolate!

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