Morgan banker joins law firm Latham & Watkins

Legal Marketing 2008/02/20 14:10   Bookmark and Share
Daniel Maze has joined Latham & Watkins as a partner in its finance department after three years at U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley the law firm said on Thursday.

Princeton-educated Maze was executive director in Morgan Stanley's leveraged and acquisition finance group.

"We have built one of the pre-eminent combined high yield and senior leveraged finance capabilities in the market, and Dan's arrival further bolsters our banking practice," said Andrew Moyle, managing partner in the firm's London office.

top

US court rules for Medtronic, bars some state suits

Headline Legal News 2008/02/20 13:46   Bookmark and Share

The U.S. Supreme Court handed a victory to Medtronic Inc on Wednesday, ruling that patients cannot sue medical-device manufacturers in state court over harm from a device that has approval from federal regulators.

By an 8-1 vote, the court ruled a 1976 law creating federal safety oversight for medical devices bars state-law claims challenging safety or effectiveness of devices that have won premarket approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The decision was the Supreme Court's first ruling on the legal effect of the FDA's approval of a medical device on liability lawsuits, Medtronic said.

The ruling could benefit other device makers, who have argued that the FDA's judgment that a product is safe and effective should protect companies from being sued for liability in state court.

The Medtronic case involved a New York man who was injured in 1996 when a doctor inflated a balloon catheter during an artery-clearing procedure.

Medtronic has said the doctor in the case used the catheter contrary to labeling instructions and in a patient for whom it was not recommended. The company no longer makes that specific catheter.

A federal trial court in Albany, New York, dismissed the lawsuit, finding the patient was not entitled to state law remedies because of the FDA's prior approval of the device.

A U.S. appeals court agreed that the lawsuit was pre-empted by federal law, and the Supreme Court upheld that decision.

top









Disclaimer: Nothing posted on this blog is intended, nor should be construed, as legal advice. Blog postings and hosted comments are available for general educational purposes only and should not be used to assess a specific legal situation. Nothing submitted as a comment is confidential. Nor does any comment on a blog post create an attorney-client relationship. The presence of hyperlinks to other third-party websites does not imply that the firm endorses those websites.

Affordable Law Firm Website Design