As early as 1967, Judge Friendly worried about the phenomenon of punitive damages overkill in mass tort litigation. Fifty years later, the problem persists....more
A bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of California recently issued a decision that is sure to raise appellate eyebrows.
Concluding in In re Sundquist that the defendant bank had violated the automatic stay by...more
Seemingly minor legal issues sometimes can have a surprisingly significant effect. That is particularly true with the ratio guidepost because the effect of any dispute about the guidepost’s application is literally...more
We are excited to report that in late December Thomson Reuters released the fourth edition of the multi-volume treatise Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts. As in the first three editions, we contributed the...more
St. Louis and Kansas City have long been cross-state baseball rivals. Who can forget the 1985 I-70 World Series?
So it is hardly surprising that on the eve of St. Louis being named by the American Tort Reform Association...more
A couple of months ago, the Kentucky Court of Appeals in Grant Thornton LLP v. Yung cut a trial court’s award of punitive damages from $80 million to $20 million—reducing the punitive/compensatory ratio to 1:1....more
In recent years, St. Louis has done much to earn a place on the American Tort Reform Association’s list of judicial hell holes. Not content to rest on its laurels, the St. Louis circuit court grabbed the headlines again last...more
Courts applying BMW and State Farm often emphasize the Supreme Court’s admonition that the constitutional line is not “marked by a simple mathematical formula”—typically when rejecting a defendant’s argument that the ratio of...more
On June 9, 2016, the California Supreme Court issued its decision in Nickerson v. Stonebridge Life Insurance Co., holding that so-called Brandt fees should be treated as compensatory damages when calculating the ratio of...more
There have been subsequent developments in several cases about which we have posted in recent months.
On April 27, 2016, the California Supreme Court denied review in Casey v. Kaiser Gypsum Co., a case in which the...more
We have previously posted—for example, here, here, here, and here—about the thorny problem of avoiding excessive punishment when multiple plaintiffs seek punitive damages for the same course of conduct. Johnson & Johnson is...more
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in BMW of North America. Inc. v. Gore, the first time the Court had ever held that a punitive damages award was unconstitutionally excessive under the Due...more
Lately, we have had many occasions to criticize courts’ analysis of punitive damages issues, so it is nice for a change to be able to report on the Tenth Circuit’s insightful decision in Lompe v. Sunridge Partners. Readers...more
A couple of months ago, I did a post about the post-trial motions in the first trial arising out of alleged defects in Wright Medical Technology’s hip implant device. On April 5, the district court resolved the motions,...more
The due process review of a punitive damages award for excessiveness has a number of interconnected parts. A series of relatively small errors can quickly add up and dramatically skew the outcome of a review process that is...more
An issue that seems to be arising with increasing frequency is whether the defendant must plead applicability of a cap on punitive damages in its answer. We have already explained why the argument that the cap is an...more
The East Coast saw quite a bit of snow in February, but that is not the only kind of blizzard we have experienced this month. In fairly rapid succession, juries in three states imposed four multi-million dollar punitive...more
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires procedural fairness in state trials, but that principle seems absent from a recent California Court of Appeal decision upholding a judgment against Kaiser Gypsum...more
A couple of months ago, we reported on a $10 million punitive verdict in the first hip implant case to go to trial against Wright Medical Technology. Last week, Wright Medical filed its opening brief in support of its...more
About a month ago, we reported on a Delaware trial court decision reducing a $75 million punitive award to $7.5 million in a transvaginal mesh case. Last week, in what we believe to be the first appellate decision in one of...more
In a post a few weeks ago, I reported on a verdict by a federal jury in Atlanta awarding $1 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages against the manufacturer of a hip implant. Not to be outdone, on...more
Last week, we posted about a $10 million award of punitive damages in a product liability action against a manufacturer of hip implants. We explained our view that the award was excessive, in part because hundreds of similar...more
In a post last month, we reported on a district court’s rulings on motions in limine in the first bellwether hip implant trial against Wright Medical Technology Incorporated. The case subsequently went to trial, and last week...more
As we noted in a post earlier this year, the Missouri courts seem to produce more than their fair share of opinions on punitive damages issues. About a year ago we wrote a post addressing the errors in the Missouri Supreme...more
As we have observed in a prior post, defendants in punitive damages cases often fail to develop evidence in mitigation of the amount of punitive damages, enabling the plaintiff to focus the jury on evidence about the...more