O'Melveny & Myers

While O'Melveny & Myers is not a firm that fashions itself as a life sciences specialty shop, two of its biggest wins of the year have involved this industry, logged by two Los Angeles trial lawyers.

Celebrity courtroom ace Dan Petrocelli secured a complete defense verdict for Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Johnson & Johnson in the first bellwether trial in a California Coordinated Proceeding involving more than 10,000 claims over the antipsychotic medication Risperdal. The trial involved claims by a 24-year-old Kansas man that he developed gynecomastia from prior Risperdal use. The plaintiff was prescribed Risperdal "off-label" as a child, for severe violence and behavioral issues, before it was approved by the FDA for children. Petrocelli and the O'Melveny team also exposed that the plaintiff's claim had been manufactured after his mother saw an attorney advertisement on television and that the plaintiff did not even have gynecomastia; any enlargement of his breasts was due to fatty, rather than glandular, tissue. After a more than two-week trial, the jury rendered a verdict for the defense in less than two hours. Several more Risperdal cases are set for trial in 2018.

Richard Goetz is defending Amylin, a subsidiary of AstraZeneca, against claims brought by hundreds of plaintiffs in personal injury cases involving Byetta, an injectable medication for type-2 diabetes, in a California Coordinated Proceeding and a federal multidistrict litigation. The suits allege that Amylin failed to adequately test and monitor the side effects of the drug, and did not warn doctors or patients of the risk of developing pancreatic cancer, thyroid cancer and/or pancreatitis. The federal and state courts both granted summary judgment in the defendants' favor on preemption grounds, but the Ninth Circuit reversed to allow additional discovery, and the issues will then be briefed again. The state court order is on appeal.