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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