Drug and Device Blog
www.druganddevicelaw.blogspot.com
Dechert LLP
www.dechert.com
Cross-Fertilization
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
With our focus on prescription drug and medical device product liability litigation, we
sometimes overlook developments that occur outside the boundaries of our own little
sandbox. While that’s necessary to restrict the blog’s scope to something manageable,
nonetheless it’s somewhat artificial. Drug and device law doesn’t exist in some kind of
vacuum, cut off from the rest of tort law. What we do here sometimes affects other types of
cases, and what goes on in other types of cases certainly can have significant impact on our
clients.
One of the other things that Bexis does around here to make himself useful is to prepare
monthly memoranda that summarize newly decided cases involving Pennsylvania tort and
product liability law generally (he's a glutton for punishment). In that capacity, he came across
Pennsylvania Trust Co. v. Dorel Juvenile Group, Inc., 2011 WL 3740472 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 25,
2011), which on its face has nothing to do with prescription drugs or devices. Instead, it has to
do with injury allegedly suffered from a child car seat.
The accident apparently happened when, for unknown reasons, the child’s mother plowed her
minivan headlong into a tree. The father originally brought the suit, but also for unknown
reasons – possibly due to the parents’ questionable actions – a bank ended up as guardian ad
litem. See Pennsylvania Trust Co. v. Dorel Juvenile Group, Inc., 2011 WL 2789336 (E.D. Pa.
July 18, 2011) (parents sanctioned for recklessly spoliating the product); Waltman v. Dorel
Juvenile Group, Inc., 2009 WL 2877153 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 28, 2009) (parents entered into secret
release, and then hid it during discovery).
The Dorel opinion at No. 3740472 addressed with a plethora of "in limine" (that means
evidentiary matters presented before trial) motions. We're old enough to remember when in
limine motions were thought of as unusual; but they've propagated faster than rabbits since
we've been practicing - but back to the point.
In deciding these in limine motions the interconnectedness of the law becomes blatantly
apparent in Dorel. First off, in an extremely odd decision, the court threw the case into
suspense, and refused to decide a large number of the motions. We’ve blogged before about
