Sean Wajert of the MassTortDefense Blog has a post on a court’s denial of a plaintiff’s ethics expert in an OBTape MDL pending in Georgia. We routinely disagree with Sean’s blog (we’re on different sides of the aisle, of course), but there isn’t much disagreement with this post.
Disclaimer: I haven’t been following the OBTape litigation too closely, so all my information is secondhand.
The plaintiffs hired a business ethicist, Professor Ann Buchholtz, to testify that the product manufacturer should have provided certain information about the product to physicians and consumers. This is essentially a failure to warn claim. The problem with hiring a business ethicist (who, apparently has no particular expertise in medical devices or medical ethics, which arguably could alter the analysis) is that she is unnecessary. A jury is tasked with determining whether a company failed to warn about specific dangers. Having an expert say what is “ethically” required is merely an attempt to substitute an expert’s opinion for that of the jury. And the danger is that the opinion comes cloaked in the guise of expert testimony, so a jury might be more willing to accept the expert’s viewpoint.