Susan Barfield (00:06):
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tort Talk Thursday here with my good friend Joe Fantini of Rosen Injury Lawyers. Joe, as always, it’s great to spend a little bit of time with you and hear the latest and greatest on all things mass tort.
Joe Fantini (00:18):
Thanks for having me, Susan. Always love getting together with you each week to go over the latest developments in the world of mass torts.
Susan Barfield (00:25):
And I know you’ve got a few litigation updates for us. Before we dive right in, I just wanted to take a moment and thank today’s sponsor. Today’s sponsor of Tort Talk Thursday is FinLegal. Uh, empower your team to maximize legal fees through FinLegal average case and practice management systems, store data, emails and documents relating to claims, but do not drive firm revenue or cost savings through client self-service automation and AI. So FinLegal has an easy to access portal and clients will be able to provide your firm with important case details and documents, all while receiving automated updates and communications about their case. You wanna learn a little bit more about FinLegal? You can head over to schedule a demo at FinLegal.io. So again, thanks so much to FinLegal for today’s sponsorship. So Joe, let’s dive right in and talk a little bit about some of these updates. Why don’t we start off with Bair Hugger?
Joe Fantini (01:18):
Yeah, Bair Hugger’s one of those MDLs that seems like it’s been around forever. The MDL was formed way back in 2016 and we had a twisted tail of a litigation experts getting excluded, getting overturned on appeal, but here we are, eight years in getting ready for 2025 and we have almost 8,000 filed cases finally in the MDL. Looks like we’re gonna have some of the first bellwether cases going to trial scheduled to begin in March, 2025. So this is a litigation that’s been under the radar. Seems like there’s a little bit more time to get involved and hopefully be a resolution early Q1 or Q2 2025.
Susan Barfield (01:56):
Yeah, that’s exciting to hear about. Um, Bair Hugger, like you said, it’s been kind of flying under the radar, so, um, thanks for sharing those updates. Uh, next let’s talk a little bit about Ozempic. Where, what are the updates there?
Joe Fantini (02:06):
Yeah, Ozempic, when this litigation started, it started with the flurry, a lot of activity, a lot of excitement about it. Unfortunately, the judge originally assigned to it passed away, caused a little bit of delay in the litigation, but we’ve been able to rebound. We have about 1,300 filed cases there in the eastern district of Pennsylvania. What we have finally now is the scheduling order related to defendant’s motion to dismiss. They’ve been chomping at the bits for this, their motion’s due in January. We’ll do a response and a reply due at the end of April. Oral arguments likely in June, we’ll have a decision early summer 2025. We’re feeling pretty confident we’re gonna be able to beat that back, but there’s always a risk in these pharmaceutical cases. But once we survive that motion to dismiss the litigation will really be going forward and hopefully we can get to trial in 2026.
Susan Barfield (02:56):
Okay. And lastly, Uber, what do you anticipate for 2025? Do you think that there will be any trials?
Joe Fantini (03:03):
Yeah, so Uber litigation, we’re seeing about 1,500 filed cases. Uber’s really been fighting this hard since the MDL was formed. They’re trying to rely on some language in their agreements, not able to do MDL’s consolidated actions. They’re still fighting that. We’re waiting for a decision from the appellate court on that. Meanwhile, it looks like we’re gonna really have some trial dates in 2025. The parties just exchanged some proposals. We couldn’t come to agreement on anything. Expect the judge to enter the order, the first order in 2025, laying out the process for the bellwether cases. It looks like that first trial will start in the fall. So sometime to get involved in those cases, there’s more time there, but we’ll all look for that initial order, selling those, setting those all important bellwether trials kicking off 2025.
Susan Barfield (03:50):
Awesome. Joe, as always, appreciate you taking some time to to visit with me and I also wanna just say thank you again to FinLegal for today’s sponsorship and so we’ll see you this time next week, Joe.
Joe Fantini (04:01):
Thanks for having me, Susan.
Susan Barfield (04:03):
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