As Minnesota Court of Appeals Judge Roger M. Klaphake ruled this past week, “Minnesota courts have not addressed whether an employee can have an expectation of privacy in a company email account, although other jurisdictions have examined this issue.  Conclusions are mixed.” Most employers and certainly all large employers have email policies.  These tend to set the ground-rules from the start, giving notice to employees that they sh… Continue reading →

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) broke that back-dating story back in 2006, which, over the ensuing several years cost corporate America hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.   The WSJ broke another story over the weekend that plainly would trigger lawsuits, which it has now done.  Time will tell whether the story and the privacy breach will open up another cottage industry or whether the contagion will be contained… The named pl… Continue reading →

…or the Seventh Circuit needed expertise in connection with an e-discovery pilot project last month, they went to Redgrave LLP.   Redgrave’s “4 P’s of eDiscovery: Proportionality, Privilege, Preservation, and Privacy” is a particularly penetrating PowerPoint primer on the panoply of pitfalls faced by U.S. civil litigators. (Seriously, its a very useful resource provided by Redgrave’s highly focused lawyers. Here is an… Continue reading →

The proliferation of information through the internet has huge societal implications for privacy and reputation, which have been playing out for a decade and will continue.  (Cyber-bullying is a related phenomenon.) The law, of course, has recognized citizens’ interests in both privacy and reputation for years but how will recent social and technological changes affect this area of the law? (Minnesota’s seminal case in this area of t… Continue reading →

The interesting fact pattern that gives rise to the problem in this case is what are the duties of a generic drug manufacturer if, after a drug’s initial federal approval (and approval (and then mandated use) of a specific warning label), new information comes to light about potentially harmful side effects?  Can a claim be brought against the manufacturer under state law for failure to warn? Gloria Mensing took a medicine, MCP, a gene… Continue reading →

…s of the drug, an antibiotic. Levaquin included a warning but sometime after Schedin’s incident, the warning was changed and made more prominent (made into a “black box” warning in 2008).  Subsequent warning label changes would be a classic “subsequent remedial measure” inadmissible at trial if it were not for the fact that the label change was mandated by the FDA, U.S. District Court Judge John R. Tunheim has held. … Continue reading →

…n that would have negatively affected levofloxacin sales in both Europe and the United States.  Over the past decade, there appears to have been increased concern about these medications and the communication of risk on their labels.  The label warnings have been increasingly emphatic.  Plaintiffs’ theories seem to be, in a nutshell, that the drug companies knew of the medicine’s risks and have steadfastly tried to understate or de-em… Continue reading →

Were you sold a flare root injection regimen for a treasured oak or multiple oaks on your property to prevent oak wilt disease, only to have your tree die from oak wilt notwithstanding the hundreds of dollars (or more) spent on flare root injection? One label on branded propiconazole says,  “Preventive application is more effective than therapeutic treatment.”  Some companies that “administer” the flare root injections d… Continue reading →

…rm or illness? As a first line of defense, pharmaceuticals and device manufacturers seek protection under federal regulation but there are ways for such manufacturers to game that system (by promoting, for example, “off label” uses or, theoretically, by duping federal regulators by other means (i.e., concealing or distorting data as to efficacy or side effects)). So the FDA may afford medical companies some protection, but that protec… Continue reading →

…njection regimen for a treasured oak or multiple oaks on your property to prevent oak wilt disease, only to have your tree die from oak wilt notwithstanding the hundreds of dollars (or more) spent on flare root injection? One label on branded propiconazole says,  “Preventive application is more effective than therapeutic treatment.”  Some companies that “administer” the flare root injections do so with a guaranty or warran… Continue reading →