Pharmaceutical Claims

Drug manufacturers are responsible for injuries caused by their products.

MR. JAMES PETIT: The Pharmaceutical litigation is relatively new. I've been doing it for about a decade which in legal terms is relatively new. I was co-lead trial counsel in a pretty famous trial in New Jersey involving Fen-Phen, which was the Diet Drug litigation, which went on for two months. The judge that I was in front of, Judge Cordemus subsequented that in another pharmaceutical litigation which involved an over-the-counter drug called PPA, pointed me as the liaison counsel for the state of New Jersey. So I assisted the court system in that status. The pharmaceutical litigation is another litigation where the clients really just don't know. They don't know why they're injured, they don't know why their heart valves are injured. They don't know why they had a stroke. They have no medical history, no prior history of any problems. They have no risk factors. And upon examination they may have taken drugs such as Resolin, or Fen-Phen, the diet drug or PPA, or Bacol. Those are the kinds of litigations that we've been working on for ten years to help these people find out if, in fact, that was the cause of their very serious disabling and sometimes fatal injuries. Frequently the guinea pigs are, in fact, the public. The drug gets on the market, and then the injuries, in fact, which could have been found if the testing had been better early on, the bad results then surface. An example of a pharmaceutical litigation that ended successfully just this year in 2007 was an over-the-counter drug called PPA, Bayer Corporation, which is a multi-national global corporation. They defended it very tooth and nail, shall we say, for six years. They litigated the case for six years. The PPA case that I just settled was in Arizona, and we settled it successfully for $850,000, which was a very good result for this client.