What is a bellwether case, and what role could bellwether trials play in the Depo-Provera litigation? In this educational video, attorneys Ben Martin and Greg Vigna, JD, MD discuss the bellwether process and explain important concepts involved in ongoing Depo-Provera litigation. The discussion covers how bellwether cases are selected, why discovery and internal documents can be important during litigation, whether an individual case could potentially be selected as a bellwether case, the role of expert witnesses, and meningiomas. If you are following the Depo-Provera lawsuits or have questions about how mass tort litigation and bellwether cases work, this video is intended to help explain the legal process and terminology in an understandable way.
Topics discussed: Depo-Provera lawsuits • Depo-Provera litigation • Depo shot • meningioma • bellwether cases • bellwether trials • mass tort litigation • MDL litigation • discovery • internal documents • expert witnesses • pharmaceutical litigation
Ben C. Martin | Ben Martin Law Group 3500 Maple Ave., Suite 400 Dallas, Texas 75219 (214) 761-6614 | bencmartin.com
Greg Vigna, JD, MD | Vigna Law Group 8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Suite 102 Los Angeles, CA 90045 817-809-9023 | vignalawgroup.com
EDUCATIONAL CONTENT DISCLAIMER:
This video is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different, and past results or developments in other cases do not guarantee or predict the outcome of any individual case.
Speaker 1
This drug has been on the market since 1992. FDA approves it's 1992.
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Speaker 2
We are taking the lead in many ways against Pfizer.
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Speaker 1
What is a bellwether? Right? There are eight bellwether cases that have been selected in state California for trial. Five of those cases we are representing the women who work injured and have meningioma from Depo-Provera. We're all working with together to get the best result we can because what a bellwether case is, it's a case that is intended to be tried.
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Speaker 1
Doesn’t mean it will be tried, but is intended to be tried to get a sense of what the value of those cases are. If the case is won, if the case is lost, how big the verdict is. What's the top cases? It's a difficult case with respect to damages. How injured the person is. How injury requires what the meningioma is.
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Speaker 1
Is it a recurrent. All of these different things go into whether or not: One, the case is selected as a bellwether. Number two, what may or may not be expected out of trial. The bellwether. But it's really important that we have these five cases which we are paying attention to, along with all the other thing paying attention to.
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Speaker 1
Very important that we pay attention to these bellwether trials of bellwether cases in California. Some day, they will be dry.
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Speaker 2
We are taking the lead in many ways against Pfizer. So we have been busy with our own discovery of internal documents, and we have asked the court to potentially intervene so we can get additional discovery regarding internal documents that relate to complaints of meningioma, as that was reported to the company.
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Speaker 1
You know, cases are settled sometimes based on what happens with a bellwether case. Bellwether is something that particular sheep was called in the old X hundreds of years ago, and the bellwether sheep would be the one that has the bell so that everyone would know where that sheep heard it. Somehow they took that and become the ballot in lawsuits.
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Speaker 1
And that's what it means. It's a bellwether, whether or not it truly means that that a case has the value, other cases or other similarly situated cases. Who knows. But that's the intent of it. Now, do we have other cases that may become bellwethers in cases filed in Connecticut, 72 cases filed in Connecticut, that may go through a bellwether process.
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Speaker 1
We have over 100 cases filed in Minnesota that may go through a bellwether process. We don't know yet. And then we've got what are called one off cases where similar cases in Wisconsin and in Hampshire and other places, Washington state, Washington, that we are focusing on if, well, and individually litigating those cases so that we can get to trial and try those cases and get verdicts, which is what we do and what we are trying to do, because anything that helps any any verdict, in any case, good verdict helps all.
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Speaker 2
And that involves producing a very good trial work product, and that involves retaining experts that are highly qualified to talk about causation related to Depo-Provera and meningioma and and understand the science internal documents understand, the FDA regulations as it relates to, reporting. And we are very pleased with the experts that we have retained. They've signed non-disclosure agreements so they could review internal documents and make opinions as to what scientifically was known, what was knowable, and and to tell the story, because ultimately, the story of Upjohn, Pharmacia and Pfizer comes from the internal documents.
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Speaker 2
But to explain the internal documents and the science that generally comes through, experts.
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Speaker 1
That's right. And not just one expert, but many experts from the what we call liability experts and the experts who know about the, the basis for, liability or negligence or product liability. And then they put that together with the expert in damages. We may have life care plans and the economists and, all the way from start to finish, we put those together so that we can beat motions.
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Speaker 1
Gather up your experts. You're going to have a good case. You're talking about a case involving a medical product, or in this case, the medical product being Depo-Provera or MVA. It's chemical. We put those experts together? We get the top experts in the country and sometimes the top experts in the world, and those that are knowledgeable about the things they need to be knowledgeable about because it's really, really important in a case like this, we want to take a case that is by all means a complicated case and make it simple, because that's how you present a case, and that's how it should be presented.
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Speaker 1
And so it really gets down to it. These cases were very simple, that Pfizer knew what was going on with the relationship between the Depo Provera and meningioma and known it for a long, long time. And it's our job to put that together so that we can show the court and hopefully tell the jury when it comes time for that.
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Speaker 2
So this is a very interesting litigation, because it spans decades, many decades. So that was first approved in the 1950s in Peru and then in the United States. They were trying to get it approved for contraceptive purposes. And in the 1970s it was rejected by the FDA three times. And then finally in 1992, it was approved as a drug that was safe for the purposes of contraceptives and the laws that govern clinical studies and notification of adverse events.
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Speaker 2
They change over a period of time. So we have found experts, many of them gray in the hair, because the duration that this drug has been on the market.
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Speaker 1
This drug has been on the market since 1992. FDA approves it's 1992. That's 34 years on the market as a contraceptive or a birth control methodology. So it's a long time, but you have to go way back those 34 years and before to find out what was happening before that to determine whether or not manufacturer, before even the drug was on the market was known, or was it knowable that that drug created meningioma?
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Speaker 1
And we know that they may feature and zero, that drug actually did know should have known that there was an association between injecting of the drug and meningioma, which is, as you know, a brain tumor that's very serious.