CLEVELAND (Legal Newsline) - It was “egregious” and it was unjustified, but the failure of plaintiff lawyers to reveal they’d put a star witness on the payroll more than a year ago didn’t justify the ultimate sanction of barring him from testifying in an upcoming trial, the judge overseeing federal multidistrict litigation against the opioid industry has decided.
CLEVELAND (Legal Newsline) - Plaintiff attorneys have been sanctioned over their failure to disclose a consulting agreement with a key witness in the opioid multidistrict litigation, as defendant companies complain they are being stonewalled on other evidence critical to the case.
OKLAHOMA CITY (Legal Newsline) - A week after Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter announced a $270 million settlement with Purdue Pharma, lawmakers are questioning why they weren’t consulted on the deal or how to distribute the money.
In the Trump administration, at least, the government will no longer look the other way as asbestos lawyers negotiate lenient terms that make it easy for their current clients to get money at the expense of future claimants and federal entitlement programs.
When it hired outside lawyers to represent it in lawsuits against the opioid industry, Harris County agreed to pay a contingency fee of 35%, more than double the rate in Dallas County and equal to the highest in the state.
Six days after the FBI arrested billionaire Raj Rajaratnam on insider-trading charges in October 2009, lawyers at Motley Rice hit him with their own charge: Financing terror.
The fight for control of Pennsylvania’s opioid litigation is not over, as Lehigh County is not happy that its case has been grouped in with more than 30 others and that lawyers it previously rejected have been tasked with overseeing the proceedings.
CLEVELAND (Legal Newsline) - The judge overseeing hundreds of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors has ordered defendant companies to pay three-quarters of the costs of special masters who are overseeing settlement negotiations.
CLEVELAND (Legal Newsline) - The judge overseeing multidistrict litigation against opioid manufacturers and distributors has named the teams of lawyers who will try to negotiate a settlement of hundreds of federal lawsuits - a complex task given parallel investigations and litigation by state attorneys general and potentially conflicting goals of private attorneys and their government counterparts.
CLEVELAND (Legal Newsline) - There will be a lot of familiar faces in U.S. District Judge Dan Polster’s courtroom in Cleveland on Jan. 31, when lawyers gather for a hearing on multidistrict litigation against the nation’s opioid manufacturers and distributors.
