Ringing in the New Year’s been a might slow. Not too much shaking loose in the Drug/Device law area it seems. There were some pretty hideous Daubert rulings in Yazmin/Yaz, but not all that much reasoning to support them. It seems to be a judicial settlement pressure tactic - aimed at defendants - since we read this morning that, immediately after issuing all these bad rulings, the court cancelled the bellwether trial that had prompted the motions in the first place, and required mediation instead. Anyway, we noted the worst of the bunch in our bottom ten post a week ago, so we’ll leave them at that.

One new case we’ve seen is Roberts v. Albertson’s LLC, ___ Fed. Appx. ___, 2011 WL 6807608 (9th Cir. Dec. 28, 2011) (non-precedential), where the combination of a corner-cutting lawyer and his not-so-bright client resulted in a nice defense win. Roberts involved a medical device, a blood pressure monitor. The plaintiff claimed it didn’t work right and gave deceptively low readings. Allegedly that caused, or was a substantial factor in, the plaintiff having a stroke.