The discovery phase in your products liability lawsuit has been completed and it’s time to decide the next course of action before proceeding to trial. One possibility, of course, is to move for summary judgment to knock out the entire case pending against your client. However, you have concluded that, despite the strengths of your case, there are enough “issues of fact” to make the exercise probably useless. Have you considered instead a Motion for…

In this third and last installment of our three-part series examining the type of deposition questioning that can derail your opponent’s expert and set up a successful Daubert challenge, we will look at Daubert’s insistence that the expert’s opinions be based on “reliable methodology” before opinions can be presented to the jury. What exactly does a reliable methodology under Daubert mean? Essentially, it requires that the expert’s opinions be based on information gathered in the…

In the first part of this series, we examined how effective deposition questioning about an expert’s education, training and experience can ultimately call into serious question the expert’s qualifications to serve as an expert witness at trial and survive a subsequent Daubert motion. We examined how some experts, despite their seemingly extensive and impressive credentials, may actually have no experience in the relevant field or may be exaggerating the depth of their past work experience.…

Deposing your adversary’s liability expert is not only a chance to delve into the details of the expert’s opinions, but the deposition also presents a great opportunity for defense counsel to explore the sustainability of the expert’s opinions going forward. In the context of a products liability case, the plaintiff’s expert’s deposition, if used wisely, can set up an effective challenge to the expert’s proffered opinions under the Federal Rules and can result in the…

New York’s appellate departments are now unified with respect to their interpretation of Article 10(a) of the Hague Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters (Hague Service Convention). The issue of whether Article 10(a) of the Hague Convention permits service of process by mail to a foreign country in the absence of an objection from the state of destination has now been resolved in New York. The…

A federal district court judge in New York City’s Southern District, applying Virginia law, recently invoked the concept of a manufacturer’s “post-sale duty to warn” to hold an automobile company potentially liable for failing to warn about an alleged defect in a car that it technically did not even manufacture. The ruling came in the context of the General Motors Ignition Switch multidistrict litigation (14-MD-2543).…

It’s probably common knowledge to even a novice product liability practitioner that a manufacturer can be held liable for a defect in a component part supplied by another company that is integrated into the manufacturer’s end product.  After all, under most commonly held notions of product liability law, the product manufacturer is subject to liability for a defect even when the defect arises solely from a flaw in a component part manufactured or supplied by…