A federal judge sanctioned a law firm representing Johnson & Johnson‘s (NYSE:JNJ) Ethicon subsidiary in some of the 18,000 cases it’s facing over pelvic mesh products in West Virginia, finding that Drinker Biddle & Reath improperly removed 1 of the lawsuits from a Pennsylvania state court.
Judge Joseph Goodwin, who’s overseeing multi-district litigation in the U.S. District Court for Southern West Virginia that covers some 55,000 cases against a raft of pelvic mesh makers, chastised the firm’s attorneys for a strategy seemingly "calculated to keep these cases out of state court for as long as possible and to waste the court’s time and the plaintiff’s resources," according to court documents.
"In this case, I do not believe that defense counsel’s actions were motivated by ignorance of the law. These are competent attorneys who knew or should have known when the notice of removal was filed that their arguments were objectively unreasonable and had no chance of success," Goodwin wrote.
Citing his December 2013 ruling that cases involving pelvic mesh supplier Secant Medical should stay with the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas where they were filed, Goodwin said Ethicon’s lawyers continued to remove cases from the Philly court to the West Virginia MDL in defiance of his decision.
"This case is not the first time that I have rejected Ethicon’s argument that these state law tort cases present a federal question," he wrote. :In those cases, I rejected precisely the same arguments Ethicon now makes. There is nothing new or exceptional in the instant matter that was not present in those earlier cases."
Goodwin ordered Drinker Biddle & Reath to cover the cost of sending the case back to the court in Philadelphia, with the amount to be determined after the cases are moved, and levied the same amount in sanctions, according to the document.
"Rehashing this same issue endlessly wastes the time of both the parties and the court, and cannot be casually overlooked," the judge wrote.
"It cannot be said that a reasonable attorney in like circumstances would have thought his actions were legally justified. It is a basic concept taught in the first year of law school that the basis for federal question jurisdiction must be found on the face of the well-pleaded complaint."