The judge in charge of multidistrict litigation involving Wyeth Pharmaceuticals’ hormone replacement pill, Prempro, has decided to sanction a law firm representing hundreds of plaintiffs, for its failure to timely produce completed client fact sheets. In re: Prempro Products et al., No. 4:03-cv-01507 (E.D. Ark.).

Judge Wilson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas recently granted Wyeth’s motion for sanctions against a Texas-based firm, although he declined to dismiss the plaintiffs.

Readers of MassTortDefense know the role plaintiff fact sheets (PFT) play in mass tort litigation, replacing some aspects of basic fact discovery; allowing defendants to gather information for early case assessment; beginning the process that winnows the number of cases that will be subjected to fuller case-specific fact discovery and expert discovery; and eventually informing the pool of cases available for initial trials if the case management process includes bellwether trials.

The information requested on the PFT is often a negotiated topic, but typically includes information that any plaintiff’s attorney who has done a good faith, Rule 11 assessment of the claim should have, or could readily access. The Manual for Complex Litigation notes that in lieu of interrogatories, questionnaires directed to individual plaintiffs in standard, agreed-on forms were used successfully in the breast implant and diet drug litigation.  It also includes sample case management orders regarding, inter alia, plaintiff fact sheets. (For other examples of plaintiff fact sheets, see In re Baycol Products Litigation, MDL 1431, Pretrial Order No. 10 (D. Minn. Mar. 18, 2002) and In re Phenylpropanolamine (PPA) Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 1407, Case Management Order No. 6 (W.D. Wash. Mar. 21, 2002)).

Wyeth showed the court that the plaintiff firm missed several court deadlines to serve completed fact sheets for each of its clients. Wyeth first argued in 2008 that plaintiffs represented by the firm had repeatedly submitted incomplete fact sheets in which they provided merely a “will supplement” answer to several questions. Judge Wilson agreed and issued an order on Dec. 17, 2008,
directing the firm to produce completed fact sheets by Feb. 2, 2009.  In February, defendant again complained to the court that hundreds of fact sheets had not been served by the deadline and that many of those that had been produced remained incomplete, with plaintiffs replacing “will supplement” with the vague language that plaintiffs do “not recall and do not have reasonable access to the information that would be responsive to this question without undue burden or cost.”
Plaintiffs were then given until April 13 to resubmit the fact sheets in accordance with the order, and the responses led Wyeth to renew its bid for sanctions including dismissal.

The judge directed the firm to pay $5,000 to Wyeth to partially compensate it for the time and effort involved in seeking adequate fact sheets.  The firm must also assign an associate or paralegal to immediately contact all plaintiffs identified by Wyeth as still having insufficient fact sheets and to have the documents filled out by August 5th.

The court warned that it was likely that additional sanctions — and perhaps considerably more severe sanctions — will be imposed if substantial effort is required to review the adequacy of fact sheets filed by Aug. 5, 2009.

The court indicated it had seriously considered dismissing all the affected cases without prejudice, and with the proviso that if a case was refiled it must have a reasonably accurate fact sheet attached and that sanctions against counsel would likely be imposed if additional fact sheets were attached with non-answers.  Only the administrative burden of dealing with amended complaint filings prevented this.