U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers ordered parties involved in the Abilify gambling litigation to reach on a common agreement regarding the selection of trial cases by the end of this year, for proceeding with the second bellwether trial.
In an order issued on Friday, Judge Rodgers indicated that a group of 100 cases must be picked randomly by July 6 for the second trial pool. The court will choose 40 cases from that pool which the plaintiffs have to agree to be tried in the multidistrict litigation (MDL). By December 21, 2018, the parties can strike off additional 10 cases each, thus reducing the pool count to 20. These cases will undergo fact-discovery and depositions before the parties finalize 10 crucial cases for bellwether trial. Jude Rodgers further stated that “The parties will meet and confer on the timing and scope of expert discovery for those 10 cases.”
If any cases need to be removed from the final trial pool, the Court will randomly replace it with the discarded cases from the second discovery pool. By September 28, 2018, the plaintiffs are required to submit a detailed Plaintiff Fact Sheet (PFS) along with authorizations for the release of medical, financial and gambling records. The outcome of these bellwethers trials will help gauge how the jury may respond to other lawsuits in the litigation.
Bristol-Myers Squibb and Otsuka Pharmaceuticals have more than 1,100 lawsuits in the federal court over failure to warn about Abilify gambling risk. Abilify lawsuits were centralized in October 2016, as a part of MDL No. 2734 (In Re: Abilify Compulsive Behavior Products Liability Litigation) before Judge M. Casey Rodgers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.
