Today’s guest post is by Reed Smith‘s Jamie Lanphear. Like Bexis, she follows tech issues as they apply to product liability litigation. In this post she discusses a pro-plaintiff piece of legislation recently introduced in Congress that would overturn the current majority rule that electronic data is not considered a “product” for purposes
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Another Shameless Plug – Calling All Life Sciences In-House Counsel: Wrap Up Your 2025 CLE Requirements with Us
By Bexis
If you’re an in-house counsel working in the pharmaceutical, biotech, medical device, or digital health space (and still looking to complete CLE hours before year-end) we invite you to join Reed Smith’s annual Virtual Life Sciences CLE Week, taking place November 3–7, 2025.
This week-long event will feature a series of live webinars on the…
Shameless Plug – Reed Smith’s Virtual Life Sciences CLE Week
By Bexis
To all in-house counsel working in the pharmaceutical, medical device, biotech, and digital health industries: if you’re looking to complete a few final CLE hours before the end of 2025, we invite you to attend Reed Smith’s annual Virtual Life Sciences CLE Week, taking place from November 3 through November 7, 2025.
This week-long event…
What about Plaintiff Lawyer Advertising?
By Bexis
As we’ve discussed earlier several times, there is a lot of lawyer advertising on television and in other media, and it can have adverse effects. A lot of it also is of questionable accuracy, giving “the false impression that they reflect medical or governmental advice,” using phrases such as “consumer medical alert,” “health alert,”…
Arbitrary and Capricious Action as a Management Style
By Bexis
When a federal agency reverses course, the Supreme Court has a test to determine whether that agency action is impermissibly “arbitrary and capricious.” FCC v. Fox Television Stations, Inc., 556 U.S. 502 (2009), set the current APA standard for review of federal agency flipflops. While no “heightened standard” exists under the APA for reversals of…
Guest Post – Heads Up: A New Era of Digital Product Liability in the EU
By Lisa Baird
Today’s guest post comes from our Reed Smith colleague Jamie Lanphear on a topic near and dear to the Blog’s heart: The new EU Product Liability Directive. As always, our guest posters deserve 100% of the credit, and any blame, for their posts. But, also as usual, our guest posters deliver the goods, so we…
E.D. Texas Invalidates FDA Effort to Regulate Lab Tests as Devices
These days there are two topics that dominate legal conferences, presentations, and CLEs: artificial intelligence (AI) and Loper Bright. You will doubtless see us frequently bloviate about the former, but today’s case – American Clinical Laboratory Ass’n v. Food and Drug Administration, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59869, 2025 WL 964236 (E.D. Tex. March 31, 2025) –…
Some Semi-Intelligent Takes on Artificial Intelligence
December is both a festive and frantic month. Along with all the caroling, wassailing, and gift-buying, the last month of the year invariably sees us squeezing in continuing legal education (CLE) credits, reconnecting with old friends at the ACI drug and device conference in New York City, and wrapping up the Fall/Winter semester class we…
Texas Says No to Putting the Cart Before the Horse
We are going to assume that Texans know a few things about horses, carts, barn doors, leading to water, and whatever other horse adages we can come up with. But when it comes to litigation, the Texas Court of Appeals took a firm line with a plaintiff who was looking to get deposition and document…
Software as a Product – The European Union Goes There
By Bexis
We’ve written a number of posts on whether, in various jurisdictions across the United States, software and other forms of electronic/magnetic code can be considered to be “products” for purposes of product liability – usually strict liability. As befits the decentralized product liability litigation landscape in the United States, there is considerable uncertainty, but most…