Dallas Fort Worth Injury Lawyer Blog

June 4, 2010

US asks judge to reject Transocean liability cap.

Bloomberg News (6/3, Fisk, Calkins) reports, “The US government asked a federal judge to reject Transocean Ltd.’s bid to use a 159-year-old law to cap its liability at $27 million for environmental claims tied to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The Justice Department announced an investigation of whether any criminal or civil laws were violated in the BP Plc oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the biggest US spill on record. The government is reviewing whether there were violations of the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.”

The US filed the motion in Houston federal court to ‘make clear’ it’s entitled to pursue claims ‘for pollution response costs, environmental damages and other injuries stemming from the oil spill,’ Assistant US Attorney General Tony West wrote.

‘It is simply unconscionable, in the circumstances of this case, that Transocean is attempting to use this’ law to avoid paying states or the US for damages caused by the rig explosion, West said in a May 24 letter to Transocean’s lawyers.”

Read full Bloomberg article here.

June 3, 2010

Verizon Ordered to Pay Damages to Brain Injured Man

by Dr. Shezad Malik

A New York man has been awarded $40 million in a lawsuit he filed against Verizon after he was struck and almost killed by one of the company’s vans.

Matthew Falcone was hit by a van going about 50 mph four years ago and spent weeks in the hospital in a coma. He suffers from brain damage and is partially paralyzed.

Scott Shifrel , New York Daily News 05/28/2010
Read Article: New York Daily News

June 2, 2010

Florida Drywall Suit Granted Class-Action Status

by Dr. Shezad Malik

A Miami judge approved a lawsuit for class-action status over the issue of tainted drywall imported from China.

The lawsuit will represent 152 families and was filed against homebuilder South Kendall Construction Corp., Palm Isles Holdings, Keys Gate Realty and Banner Supply.

The lawsuit alleges that some of the drywall installed in Florida homes releases large amounts of hydrogen sulfide, which corrodes metal.

June 1, 2010

Dallas UT Southwestern Medical Center To Pay $3.6 M In Lawsuit

by Dr. Shezad Malik

A Dallas jury awarded Dr. Nassar $3.6 million in a lawsuit he filed against University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center over racial and religious persecution.

According to the lawsuit, Nassar’s boss, Dr. Levine, told Nassar that she thought people from the Middle East were lazy and questioned his direct supervisor about his productivity.

Due to the harsh environment created by Levine, Nassar was driven to quite he job, he claims.

By SUE GOETINCK AMBROSE and BROOKS EGERTON / The Dallas Morning News
Read Article: Dallas Morning News

May 31, 2010

McNeil Consumer Healthcare Accused of Hiding Motrin Recall

by Dr. Shezad Malik

The company at the center of a massive recall of children’s Tylenol and other popular over-the-counter products tried to perform a “phantom recall” of defective Motrin by sending contractors around the country to buy up the medicine from stores without alerting regulators or the public.

When faced last year with Motrin IB caplets that were not dissolving properly, McNeil Consumer Healthcare, a division of Johnson and Johnson, hired contractors to buy the products under orders not to mention the term “recall.”

After the Food and Drug Administration discovered the effort — because one of the contractors accidentally dropped an instruction sheet on the floor of a store — McNeil announced a recall of roughly 88,000 packages of the product.

Read the full story here at the Washington Post.

May 30, 2010

Dallas Oil Recovery Team: BP Leak ‘Top Kill’ Fails

by Dr. Shezad Malik

In another setback in the effort to stem the flow of oil gushing from a well a mile beneath the Gulf of Mexico, BP engineers said that the “top kill” technique had failed and they had decided to move on to another strategy.

The abandonment of the top kill technique, was the latest in a series of failures. First, BP failed in efforts to repair a blowout preventer with submarine robots. Then its initial efforts to cap the well with a containment dome failed when it became clogged with a frothy mix of frigid water and gas.

BP has started work on two relief wells, but officials have said that they will not be completed until August — further contributing to what is already the worst oil spill in United States history.

Read the full story here at the New York Times.

May 30, 2010

Dallas Texas Accutane Lawsuit Update

by Dr. Shezad Malik

Plaintiff Andrew McCarrell was awarded $25.16 M in damages in his lawsuit against Roche Holding AG, maker of Accutane. McCarrell alleged in his lawsuit that his use of Accutane resulted in inflammatory bowel disease. McCarrell underwent five surgeries, including one to remove his colon.

According to Bloomberg on 2/16/10, McCarrell initially was awarded $2.62 M in his lawsuit, but that award was overturned and a new trial was ordered.

Accutane was introduced to the market in 1982 with a list of serious side effects including birth defects and depression. More than 13 million people reportedly used Accutane before Roche removed it from the market in June 2009, citing the cost of personal injury lawsuits.

May 22, 2010. By Heidi Turner Read full story here Lawyers and Settlements

May 29, 2010

Toyota Lawsuits in California Might Be Coordinated

by Dr. Shezad Malik

Lawsuits in California state court against Toyota Motor Corp. related to sudden acceleration of its vehicles should be coordinated so they can be handled more efficiently, a judge said.

Judge West said he will recommend to the California Supreme Court’s chief justice that the cases be coordinated in either Los Angeles or Orange County. He also said he would recommend that the personal injury cases either proceed as a separate group before the same judge or in one group on separate tracks with the class-action lawsuits alleging economic loss.

Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, faces at least 228 federal and 99 state lawsuits including proposed class actions over economic loss and claims of personal injuries or deaths allegedly caused by sudden-acceleration incidents. The federal lawsuits were combined April 9, before U.S. District Judge James V. Selna in Santa Ana, California.

Read the full Bloomberg story here.

May 28, 2010

For Asbestos-Ravaged Town, Questions Persist

by Dr. Shezad Malik

Health workers tracking Libby’s plight estimate at least 400 people have died of asbestos-related illnesses — from W.R. Grace mine workers and family members who breathed in the dust they brought home in their clothes, to those who played as kids in waste piles dumped by the company behind the community baseball field.

Some 1,500 locals and others who were exposed have chest X-rays revealing the faint, cloudy shadows of asbestos scarring on their lungs. Even though research long showed cause for concern — up to 70 percent of miners in a 1980s study had fibers in their lungs — it took news reports about the deaths to drive officials to action, beginning a decade ago.

After the cleanup began, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency confidently predicted it would be done in two years at a cost of $5.8 million. Ten years on, the price tag has exceeded $333 million, the deaths continue, and more asbestos keeps showing up — in schools, in businesses, in hundreds of houses.

The scope of contamination has at times overwhelmed environmental regulators, dragging out the cleanup, an Associated Press review of hundreds of pages of government documents and interviews with current and former agency officials revealed.

Matthew Brown, Associated Press, Yahoo News 05/25/2010

May 27, 2010

Actor Dennis Quaid Files Suit Over Heparin Drug Mix Up

by Dr. Shezad Malik

Actor Dennis Quaid has filed a lawsuit against drug maker Baxter Healthcare Corp. over two easily confused drugs that, when mixed up, almost killed his twin infants.

The lawsuit claims that the blood thinner Heparin and a less potent drug, Hep-lock, have such similar labels that the two are easily confused. In late 2007, Quaid’s twins were given an almost fatal dose of Heparin instead of Hep-lock at a local hospital. The lawsuit also states that the company should have recalled the Heparin because they knew that similar incidents had occurred before.

Staff and Wire Reports, Contra Costa Times 05/25/2010
Read Article: Contra Costa Times