Susan B. (0:00:06) – Good morning, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tort Talk Thursday here again, as I am every week with Joe Fantini from Rosen Injury Lawyers. And Joe, I know today you are going to give us updates and insights on Talc, Baby Food and Ozempic. So as always, we’re grateful that you’re here and giving us the industry’s latest and greatest.
Joe F. (0:00:25) – Yeah, thanks, Susan. Always excited to talk to you about Mass Torts. Busy week again here in Mass Torts. I think I’ll start off with a Talc update. So, as everybody knows, we had J&J go through two unsuccessful bankruptcies, petitions which pretty much froze the whole litigation. After those got denied, we ended up having a couple Meso cases being teed up for trial at the end of last year, J&J ended up to doing a bulk or an inventory settlement for a number of Meso cases. And then we finally had some other cases move forward. Unfortunately, the first case was an ovarian case down in Florida, and there was a mistrial declared after there was a hung jury. We had another case go forward down in Florida as well, another ovarian case, and this time it returned to defense verdict. So that was very discouraging news for everybody who’s been involved in this litigation. But almost immediately thereafter, we got some positive news when there was in Illinois a $45 million verdict handed down in a Meso case. So this really is encouraging news. But what I think we’re going to see here is that this litigation is going to be split out between ovarian cases and Meso cases. I anticipate the Meso cases get resolved and then we’ll see some inventory settlements in the ovarian cancer cases later this year.
Susan B. (0:01:44) – Perfect. Well, awesome. Well, thanks for that on Talc. Can I guess, share what is new as it relates to Baby Food?
Joe F. (0:01:51) – Baby Food. So this is our newest Mass Tort where we have an MDL that was recently formed in California. So there’s thousands of cases anticipated here, and we just had the judge enter the initial case management order. We’re going to have the initial case management conference coming up here in mid May, and the applications for leadership are due at the end of April here. So it looks like this is going to be a big litigation, expecting 10 to 20,000 cases. We have some really good attorneys involved, a lot of people that need our help. So this is going to be one to certainly watch here in 2024.
Susan B. (0:02:25) – Another one that is on everyone’s mind, and lots of folks are talking about is Ozempic. So what do you have for us there.
Joe F. (0:02:31) – Ozempic, another one of the mass torts that was formed this year. We have the MDL ongoing here in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. We have a good judge, a good venue. We had a little bit of a disagreement between some of our colleagues here about who should be ultimately on leadership, but judge Pratter just entered an order establishing leadership. We have some really good attorneys and now that that’s in place, we can really turn our focus to the defendant. So the defendants are trying to split the litigation between each of them. But we’re really going to need to get into discovery here, work on a long form complaint, a short form complaint, plaintiff profile forms, and hoping within the next three months we’ll have that in place and then we’ll really see this litigation take off.
Susan B. (0:03:12) – Awesome. Joe, as always, thanks so much for taking a moment to give us some quick hits and updates on these torts in the industry.
Joe F. (0:03:19) – Thanks for having me, Susan.
