Bayer's Lawyers Ask Yaz Victims for Personal Information

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Greenberg & Bederman

Have you ever been questioned on the witness stand or in a deposition? It isn’t fun.

The main job of the opposing counsel is to make the jury doubt the validity of your testimony. This means they will do everything short of calling you a liar. They will pick apart your story, obsess over irrelevant details of your testimony and call your motives into question.

If that doesn’t work, the opposing counsel often has no problems with getting personal. They will often ask you questions about your life that has absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand. The reason they do this is because they want to make you appear untrustworthy to the judge or jury.

Fortunately, for thousands of women across the country, the judge presiding over the Yaz birth control pill case will be placing limits on these sorts of questions.

For those of you who don’t know, there have been hundreds of lawsuits filed against Bayer over their line of birth control pills. These pills, which are marketed under the names of Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella, contain drospirenone, which is a synthetic variation of the hormone progestin. This variation has been shown to increase the level of potassium in the bloodstream of the women who use these birth control pills. This can cause deep vein thrombosis, which is the formation of blood clots in the veins and arteries of the legs. Quite often, theses clots break apart, and the remnants travel through the bloodstream, causing blockages in the lungs, heart or brain.

Due to the large number of lawsuits that were all filed under similar circumstances (users of these pills being hospitalized due to pulmonary embolisms, strokes or heart attacks,) the suits were consolidated into multi-district litigation. This means that the general ground rules of the cases will be the same, and that certain pieces of evidence will be considered as a given rather than having to be presented over and over again.

On Friday the eleventh, a hearing was held in the Philadelphia Common Pleas Court to determine these general ground rules for a yaz lawsuit. Bayer’s lawyers were seeking permission to force the plaintiffs in these Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella cases to fill out a questionnaire that would make them detail any methods of birth control that they have used besides hormonal birth control.

From here it is a very slippery slope to asking plaintiffs about how many sexual partners they have had, or how long they have been using birth control, or any manner of sleazy questions that would serve to do nothing but make the plaintiffs in this case appear to have somehow deserved what happened to them. This is the same sort of deflective questioning that many defense lawyers still use when questioning rape victims.

Judge Sandra Mazer Moss viewed the idea of the questionnaire as both inappropriate and a potential invasion of privacy:

During the hearing, Judge Sandra Mazer Moss, coordinating judge of Philadelphia's mass torts program, said she was surprised the defendants weren't asking how many partners the female plaintiffs had.

"Then we could put out a brochure and everyone will know," Moss said.

Judge Moss did mention that she might allow the defendants to obtain some information about prior contraceptive use among the plaintiffs, but she made it clear that she would not allow the proceedings to degenerate into an interrogation about the sex lives of the victims.

We also are having a hard time discerning what the motives would be for asking about past birth control use in forms that don’t involve hormonal replacement. The question at hand is whether the hormone in Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella has been causing blood clots. Condoms, IUD’s and cervical caps involve no hormones whatsoever. We can only intimate that the reason to bring this up is to publically embarrass the plaintiffs. This tactic is actually more than just being spiteful. If a woman finds out that she will have to disclose information that is very personal, it might be enough to get her to drop the case. If that seems like a cold hearted tactic, do bear in mind that there is quite a lot at stake with these cases. This isn’t just one woman who had a bad experience with these pills. This involves hundreds of women all over the country who have experienced severe medical problems, and sadly, there have even been deaths. Bayer will be sure to do anything within their power to whittle down the number of lawsuits that they will be facing, and that includes intimidation through public humiliation. With that in mind, we are pleased that Judge Moss did not allow this irrelevant and insulting questionnaire to be pursued.

Greenberg and Bederman is currently accepting cases involving women in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. who have been injured or hospitalized due to the use of these birth control pills. If you or a loved one has suffered from a stroke, heart attack, pulmonary embolism or gallbladder disease due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella, do not hesitate to contact our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, for a free yaz legal consultation.

To watch our yaz video on you tube, please click yaz lawyer video.

`
Tags: , , , , , ,

Yaz Lawsuits

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Greenberg & Bederman

Yaz Lawsuits

Our Federal Court system did something very wise earlier this month. Being mindful of the fact that several lawsuits were being filed all over the country due to the harmful and even deadly side effects of Bayer’s line of birth control pills (Yaz, Yasmin and the generic version, Oscella,) all of these lawsuits were consolidated in MDL-2100, Yasmin and YAZ Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation.

“MDL” stands for “Multi-District Legislation,” and what this means is that several suits have been filed in multiple districts over similar circumstances. In the case of Bayer’s birth control pills, hundreds of women have been suffering from similar injuries due to blood clotting after using them.

Rather than force each individual suit to go through individual court processes in their respective districts, the Judicial Panel on Multi-district Litigation can consolidate all the pretrial work. In other words, rather than have 300 separate plaintiffs present 300 different versions of what damages they received, and rather than have 300 separate experts hired by Bayer explain why each of these 300 separate plaintiffs are mistaken about their complaints, the JPML can simply bring all the plaintiffs together under the umbrella of one group of accepted evidence.

 

This does not mean that all the yaz lawsuit cases are to be handled by one attorney, or that this yaz lawsuit has been turned into a class action lawsuit. What it does mean is that, essentially, all the pre-trial evidence that was admitted during this consolidation will be used in all of the Federal cases. So rather than one attorney for one woman saying “We believe that our client’s use of Yaz caused blood clotting, which led to a pulmonary embolism for which she was hospitalized,” and having that testimony and evidence only counting for one particular case, it is taken as a given that since there are several yaz lawsuits involving Yaz users suffering from pulmonary embolisms, the evidence accepted by the JPML can be used in all of the Federal cases. In other words, each individual case involving Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella now has a common pool of established evidence that both the plaintiffs and defendants must work under.

This is good for several reasons. In the first place, most trials can be time consuming, particularly if the defendant has promised to defend his case “vigorously,” as Bayer has promised to do. If each plaintiff has to essentially start from scratch (meaning establish their own evidence, call their own witnesses, etc.) over a case that has been tried dozens or even hundreds of times, it would take that much longer for each yaz or yasmin lawsuit to come to a conclusion. 

Consolidation also saves costs for the plaintiffs. Individual plaintiffs normally have to pay for the costs of depositions, which in this case would involve scientists and corporate reps from Bayer. A situation like that actually works in Bayer’s favor, as this could involve calling in dozens or even hundreds of separate witnesses. The costs of all this could actually be quite prohibitive for an individual attorney. But by turning these cases over to multi-district legislation, all the plaintiffs that are involved can share the costs of pretrial discovery. And since all of these plaintiffs will essentially be using the same testimony as pre-trial evidence, all of the pre-trial discovery work only has to happen once.

This decision by the JPML should also keep some level of consistency from case to case. As much as we would like to pretend that all judges view the law and precedent in exactly the same way, this is definitely not the case. One judge might view a piece of evidence as irrelevant while another might view it as perfectly relevant. Consolidation establishes which evidence is admissible and which is not before the individual trials even start.

The end result of this consolidation should be a streamlined and efficient trial template that will save time and money for everyone involved. And considering the damage that these defective yaz and yasmin birth control pills are doing to women all over the country and all over the world, the last thing that any of these victims need is the standard delaying and smokescreen tactics that are considered standard operating procedure in most of the trials that big pharmaceutical companies find themselves involved in.

Make no mistake about it: Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella are dangerous drugs that are causing serious injuries among otherwise healthy women. Women in their teens, twenties and thirties are being felled by strokes and pulmonary embolisms on a regular basis, and the only common characteristic that these women shared was the fact that they were taking one of Bayer’s line of birth control pills. Will Bayer has every right to their day in court, what they should not have is the opportunity to grind the process to a halt with delays and denials in the hopes that any plaintiffs will simply give up.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. area law firm that is currently offering legal assistance to women who have been injured from taking Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella. This recent consolidation has made the process much easier for women who have been injured to get to their day in court. If you or a loved one in Northern Virginia, the District, Southern Maryland or Baltimore has been injured or hospitalized due to the use of Bayer’s line of birth control pills, contact Greenberg and Bederman for a free yaz or yasmin legal consultation today.

To learn more about yaz side effects, please read our yaz page.  To learn more abour our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, please read yaz bio or watch his yaz lawyer video.

To learn more about yaz, yasmin, or oscella dangers, please vist our website and click on the yaz page, or go to our youtube site and watch our yaz attorney video.
Tags: , , , , ,