A couple of years ago we penned a paean to Indiana and its cultural and legal triumphs. Now that another chunk of our family has decided to relocate to that happy state, our thoughts returned to Indiana's many virtues. Sure, there's the Indy 500, the fabulous covered bridges of Parke County, the Benjamin Harrison home, and a couple of our favorite in-house lawyers. And now there's In re Cook Medical, Inc., IVC Filters Mktng., Sales Practices & Prod. Liab. Lit., 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 190177 (S.D. Ind. Nov. 7, 2018).
Maybe plaintiff-files-Daubert-motion isn't quite man-bites-dog, but it's still pretty rare. Plaintiffs are usually all about getting to the jury, no matter how raggedy the case. In fact, the more raggedy, the better. Consequently, plaintiffs devote considerably more time fending off Daubert challenges than mounting their own. Maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe plaintiffs tend to put up hack experts, while defendants put up good ones. Maybe we're biased. Okay, definitely we're biased. But take a look at what happened in In re Cook.
The defendants in Cook offered the testimony of a mechanical and materials science engineer who opined that the IVC filter design was not defective and that its benefits outweighed its risks. The expert was well qualified. It's not as if it was a close call. The defense expert had the appropriate degrees from Cal Berkeley. He also had been a general manager at a company that made IVC filters. Federal Rule of Evidence 702 requires that an expert be qualified by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education. Note the "or." This expert had it all. Not only was this expert qualified, he had done the work. He looked at MAUDE adverse event data, peer-reviewed literature, the company's testing records, the design and engineering records, the opinions of other experts in the case, and fact depositions. That is, the defense expert in Cook did far more homework than virtually any plaintiff design expert we have encountered. We're not sure we've ever deposed a plaintiff design expert who has actually read the design history file. Indeed, we're pretty sure that most plaintiff experts do not know what a design history file is.
The plaintiff's main beef with the defense design expert in In re Cook concerns the opinions regarding the device's benefits and risks. The main benefit of an IVC filter is prevention of pulmonary embolisms. How can a mere engineer opine on medical issues? (Dear Engineering Nerds: Please do not write angry comments; we are using the "mere" word sarcastically. We have endless respect for engineers. We utter a prayer of thanks to them every time we drive across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. At parties, we always get next to the engineers in case a game of Jenga breaks out.) The court has no problem answering this question: "a biomedical engineer ... can testify about the benefits and ability of the Celect IVC filter to catch blood clots from a biomedical design and engineering perspective." The plaintiffs were asking the wrong question. No surprise there.
Then the plaintiffs raised other wrong questions: (1) Why doesn't the expert quantify the number of filters that actually prevented pulmonary embolisms? (2) Why does the engineer rely on adverse event data without knowing what percent of adverse events are reported? (3) How dare the expert rely on the defendant's own studies? The Cook court is untroubled by these wrong questions, and supplies clear, easy, right answers: (1) Quantification goes to weight, not admissibility. (2) No one knows the true adverse event reporting rate, so it's hard to fault the expert. Also, and again, this criticism might go to weight, but not admissibility. (3) The company's data might not be perfect, but it looks like valid evidence. The data's short-comings constitute yet another issue of weight, not admissibility. Finally, the expert relied on lots of other data besides the company's. In short, tell it to the jury.
We're still in favor of federal judges acting as stout gate-keepers when it comes to expert testimony. Junk science should be excluded. But when an expert is so well qualified and so well informed as the one in Cook, and when that expert applies reliable methods, there's no reason to exclude anything. Rather, it's time for Hoosier hospitality.
This article is presented for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute legal advice.
