Our first runners-up this week are a pair of trial teams that scored defense wins for Johnson & Johnson in St. Louis and Philadelphia in cases attempting to tie the company’s cosmetic talcum powder products to ovarian cancer. On Friday, a Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas jury sided with J&J in the first talc case to go to trial there. J&J was represented in the Philly trial by a team led by Jim Smith of Blank Rome that included lawyers from his firm and Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath. Then on Monday, a St. Louis jury took less than an hour to deliver a defense verdict in a trial where three plaintiffs asked for a total of $923 million in damages. There the defense team was led by Allison Brown of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and Michael Brown of Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, who previously nabbed Litigator of the Week honors for their late July win for J&J in a talc trial across the Mississippi River in St. Clair County, Illinois. That makes three straight defense trial wins for J&J in talc cases.
Runners-up honors also go to a Hogan Lovells appellate team lead by Neal Katyal and Sean Marotta that obtained a rare unanimous reversal from an en banc Ninth CIrcuit panel this week in an interlocutory appeal knocking out the city of Oakland’s lawsuit against Wells Fargo for alleged discriminatory lending practices. The court held Oakland’s claimed injuries of lost tax revenues and increased expenditures were not proximately caused by Wells Fargo’s allegedly discriminatory lending practices, a potentially helpful finding for the bank in defending similar cases brought on behalf of other municipalities across the country.
