Bayer is Not The Victim of Yaz Lawsuits

Posted on January 7, 2010 by Greenberg & Bederman

 

Whenever there is a high profile legal action against a manufacturer or corporation, there is almost always an outcry from some in the public who think that the biggest victim is the manufacturer or corporation.

Even if the legal action in question involves a major consumer catastrophe where hundreds of people get injured or worse, die, some people manage to portray the perpetrators as the victims. They moan about the “expense of the legal procedures,” or they complain that the courts are being clogged up with “unnecessary” or “frivolous” cases. They may also claim that lawsuits “force” businesses to raise their prices, which will impact all the consumers, and not just the ones who were injured.

We have a particularly hard time buying these arguments, especially when they come from multibillion dollar earning pharmaceutical companies. In the first place, the only thing that can “force” a pharmaceutical company to do anything is either the pharmaceutical company itself or the law. Nothing “forces” a pharmaceutical company to charge fifteen dollars for a pill that costs eight cents to manufacture. Nothing “forces” a pharmaceutical company to put out products that are dangerous to the public. Nobody “forces” pharmaceutical companies to “grind out” any and all legal proceedings when a simple admission of wrongdoing and a reasonable offer of compensation to the victims would be more than sufficient.

But the narrative is quite often sympathetic to the poor, beleaguered pharmaceutical companies who are being attacked by opportunistic and ungrateful patients and lawyers, demanding unreasonable rewards for medical problems that were “dubious” at best.

 

Before you start feeling sorry for the pharmaceutical companies, consider the case of Susan Galinas. Mrs. Galinas is a mother of two who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She had been experiencing severe menstrual pain, and under her doctor’s advice, she started taking a birth control pill called Yaz.

Yaz is one of the Bayer Corporation’s line of birth control pills. Along with Yasmin and its generic version Ocella, Yaz contains a variation of progestin called drospirenone. These three birth control pills are the only ones on the market that contain this ingredient. 

Exactly one month and one day after Mrs. Galinas started taking Yaz, she was rushed to the hospital due to a severe stroke. The stroke was so severe that surgeons had to remove part of her skull. Mrs. Galinas suffered severe brain damage, so much so that she has no short term memory capabilities, and her IQ is now just barely above the level of a person who is mentally disabled.

Mrs. Galinas’ stroke and her use of Yaz are not necessarily mutually exclusive events. They are most likely directly related. While most of the birth control pills on the market carry some element of risk, the use of drospirenone elevates these risks to a remarkable degree. The use of drospirenone elevates the chances of deep vein thrombosismore than any other birth control pill available. DVT causes clots in the bloodstream, which can break up and travel. These pieces of clot can cause blockages in the veins, which can cause heart attacks and, in the case of Mrs. Galinas, a stroke.

The Food and Drug Administration has unfortunately been very slow about taking any action regarding Yaz and Yasmin. The only positive steps the FDA has taken involved forcing Bayer to change an advertising campaign, and while that might have opened a few eyes about the dangers of these products, these pills are still readily available. And women who are prescribed these pills are still being hospitalized with pulmonary embolisms, strokes, heart attacks or gall bladder disease.

As you can tell from the footage, Mrs. Galinas’ life was changed for the worse. She was disfigured, she suffered brain damage, and she will have to spend the rest of her life as a shadow of herself. She will be unable to be the mother to her children that she once was, she will be unable to drive, and she will be unable to return to any meaningful employment. Besides her medical issues, her financial outlook is bleak, to say the least.

Bayer, on the other hand, is doing great financially. In the third quarter of 2008, Bayer made $445 million. (A financial quarter, by the way, is three months.) In the third quarter of 2009, Bayer made $462 million. In the first nine months of 2008, Bayer made $1.3 billion. In the first nine months of 2009, Bayer made $1.4 billion. And Yasmin is their top selling product.

This is hardly a beleaguered company being taken advantage of by greedy lawyers. Bayer is an enormous pharmaceutical giant earning billions. It is difficult for us to understand why Bayer is failing to admit any culpability here, or at least failing to come clean and offer decent settlements to the victims of Yaz, Yasmin, and Oscella users who have experienced real medical problems from these dangerous birth control pills.

Greenberg and Bederman is a Washington, D.C. injury law firm that has been in practice since 1985. It is our job to help those who have been seriously injured due to no fault of their own, and that includes women who have taken dangerous drugs. Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella certainly fall under that category. If you or a loved one has been hospitalized or injured due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Ocella, contact Greenberg & Bederman and ask to speak to our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, for a free yaz legal consultation.  To watch our yaz video on youtube please click on yaz lawyer video.
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Yaz Lawsuit

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Greenberg & Bederman

One of the reasons that scare people away from litigation is the amount of time that it takes for cases to come to a conclusion. Many corporations and insurance companies make it a point to delay the litigation process as much as they can, solely in the hopes of wearing out the plaintiffs. In the midst of the judicial process, there are all sorts of opportunities for both sides to file motions about one aspect of the yaz lawsuit or another, and corporate defendants often take many of them. They are in a good position to do so. Most plaintiffs in injury cases are facing real financial hardship, like medical bills or an inability to go back to work due to injuries. Insurance companies or major corporations aren’t facing any such difficulties, and can usually afford the legal costs of delaying a trial.

A product liability trial like the yaz lawsuit, can often take a long time; especially if there have been multiple victims from the same product. Fortunately for victims of Bayer’s line of birth control pills, the yaz lawsuit process has been streamlined by the judicial system, so women who have suffered from strokes, heart attacks, gall bladder disease or pulmonary embolism should not have to suffer from long and unnecessary delays.

Bayer’s birth control pills, which are marketed under the names of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella, contain an ingredient called drospirenone, which is a synthetic variation of progestin. Bayer claims that this ingredient brings with it additional benefits, such as an easier time with premenstrual dysphoric disorder as well as a cure for acne. While that might or might not be correct, the trade off is that the levels of potassium in the blood go up, which can and does cause blood clotting. These clots can break apart and travel, which can cause blockages in the heart (cardiac arrests,) blockages in the brain (strokes,) and blockages in the lungs (pulmonary embolisms.)

 

The British Medical Journal recently released a study claiming that out of all the commercially available hormonal replacement birth control pills, women that take the brands that contain drospirenone have a 6.3 % greater chance of suffering from blood clots over women who take other birth control products. Concrete evidence of this study is currently manifesting itself among women all over the country, as more and more otherwise healthy women who use Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella are being hospitalized with pulmonary embolisms, heart attacks, gallbladder disease, and strokes.

Since so many women are filing a lawsuit under such similar circumstances, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ruled that the lawsuits involving Yaz, Yasmin and Oscella should be consolidated for pretrial discovery. What this means is that rather than have each individual victim of these pills file an individual lawsuit, which would require them to provide what is essentially the same sort of evidence over and over again, and call the same witnesses over and over again, our court system has decided to determine what will be considered standard evidence in the yaz lawsuit so this won’t have to be determined again and again.

So far, the multi-district litigation has progressed somewhat smoothly, and Bayer has provided a million pages of documents as part of the discovery process. There has also been some give and take regarding how confidential information will be handled during the yaz lawsuit and trial. This actually should work in both the favor of Bayer and the plaintiffs. Bayer does not want any trade secret information to be made available, and the plaintiffs don’t want any private information regarding sexual history or birth control history to be part of the evidence. It appears that both sides should be satisfied in that regard.

What is important about this consolidation of cases within the yaz lawsuit is that a great deal of time and necessity has been removed from the trial process. With so much of the evidence and testimony already established, women will be able to present their cases that much faster. In fact, there is already discussion between Bayer and some defendant’s attorneys about what are called “bellwether trials,” in which some cases will be selected early in order to determine how these trials can be expected to proceed with the established evidence.

We hope that this consolidation of the yaz lawsuits would remove some of the barriers that could prevent many victimized women from stepping forward and pursuing a yaz lawsuit. There have been a few occasions where otherwise healthy women who have been injured and hospitalized due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella have gotten in touch with us, but then they talked themselves out of taking any action. Perhaps they were afraid that the whole process would take too long, or they somehow convinced themselves that the blame fell squarely on them, or they were convinced that a trial would bring out embarrassing personal information.

This is precisely the wrong attitude to take. Bayer has released a birth control product that is not only more harmful to women than any other similar birth control product, but they also overstated the peripheral benefits of the pill, which encouraged more and more women to buy it. Most women probably considered less acne and less mental trauma as a selling point when they started taking the pill, and were completely unaware of the increased dangers of drospirenone.

We can’t claim that going through the judicial process will be easy, because it almost never is. But we can tell you that, thanks to this multi-district litigation consolidation, quite a few of the more tedious obstacles have been removed.

Greenberg & Bederman is a personal injury law firm that offers legal assistance for injury victims in the Washington, D.C. area. We serve Silver Spring, Maryland, DC, VA, and Baltimore. We have helped thousands of Washingtonians receive fair compensation for car accidents, medical malpractice and Social Security disability. If you or a loved one has been injured due to the use of Yaz, Yasmin or Oscella, contact our yaz lawyer, Andy Bederman, for a free Yaz legal consultation, or read more about yaz on our yaz lawyer website.
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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.
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