Lilly, Novo Nordisk Enter Obesity Drug Price Deal With Trump

By Rae Ann Varona

Pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk cut a deal with the Trump administration to slash the pricing of their popular weight loss drugs in the U.S., becoming the latest to enter "most-favored-nation" pricing agreements, the White House announced Thursday.

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Med Groups Call To Break Up 'Politicized' CDC Vax Committee

By Mark Payne

A Massachusetts doctor and a group of public health trade associations want the federal government to break up a key vaccine committee tasked with nationwide vaccine policy, arguing in an amended lawsuit Thursday that the panel has been tainted with anti-vaccine sentiment.

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'Send A Message' To Novo Nordisk Over Kickbacks, Jury Told

By Ben Adlin

Counsel for a whistleblower claiming Novo Nordisk paid illegal kickbacks to boost off-label prescribing of its hemophilia drug NovoSeven urged jurors during closing arguments Thursday to "send a message" to the drugmaker, saying it defrauded Washington state's Medicaid and Medicare systems out of nearly $100 million.

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Social Media Apps Must Face Jury After Section 230 Loss

By Dorothy Atkins

A California state judge refused Wednesday to grant social media companies summary judgment on claims their platforms harm young users' mental health, again rejecting arguments that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields them from liability, and sent three cases to bellwether trials, with the first to begin Jan. 27.

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Roundup

Pa. Statehouse Catchup: Cannabis Quality, 'Deepfake' Fines

By Matthew Santoni

Even as the Pennsylvania General Assembly has struggled to agree to a state budget since the summer deadline passed, legislators have introduced and advanced bills dealing with perennial topics like cannabis legalization or responding to newer concerns like AI-fueled fraud.

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Brief

Squires Rebuffs Another 21 PTAB Petitions Without Comment

By Theresa Schliep

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Director John Squires issued a one-page order Thursday rejecting 21 patent challenges from companies including Microsoft, Apple and Google, continuing his new practice of summarily denying such petitions with no explanation.

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FDA Warns Companies About Illegal Marketing Of Botox

By Jonathan Capriel

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ordered the companies behind 18 websites to stop selling all Botox injectables to consumers that they have marketed as being able to treat chronic migraine, sweaty palms, overactive bladder and blepharospasm, or spasms that force one's eyelids closed.

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Fla. AG Says Planned Parenthood Lied About Abortion Drugs

By David Minsky

The Florida Attorney General sued Planned Parenthood on Thursday, alleging the reproductive healthcare nonprofit misrepresented the safety of abortion drugs to women in a mass marketing campaign.

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Texas AG Wants To Halt Kenvue $400M Shareholder Pay

By Jonathan Capriel

Texas wants to block Johnson & Johnson consumer health spinoff Kenvue from paying $400 million to shareholders, calling it a "fraudulent transfer" amid the company, which makes Tylenol, facing "tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities" in the state's suit alleging the company hid the risk that acetaminophen could lead to autism.

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9th Circ. Backs NLRB Ruling On Nurses' Pandemic Pay Fight

By Gina Kim

The Ninth Circuit has affirmed the National Labor Relations Board's order finding a trio of Southern California hospitals violated federal labor law by unilaterally implementing a COVID-19 pandemic pay program without first bargaining with a Service Employees International Union affiliate representing registered nurses and professional workers. 

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NJ Panel Says Med Mal Death Suit Wrongly Tossed

By Mike Curley

A New Jersey state appeals court on Thursday reinstated a woman's wrongful death suit against a Wayne hospital, finding the trial court misapplied precedent when it found her affidavit of merit was insufficient for not naming the specific employees she claims were negligent.

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Conduent Pummeled With Suits Over Monthslong Data Breach

By Carla Baranauckas

Conduent Business Services LLC has been hit with a barrage of class action lawsuits in New Jersey federal court alleging it failed to adequately protect sensitive personal and health information of more than 10.5 million individuals that were compromised in a major data breach.

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Debt Collectors Sue Over Colo.'s Medical Debt Reporting Ban

By Jon Hill

A major debt collection trade group sued to block a Colorado law banning medical debt from credit reports, arguing it conflicts with a federal law that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently said doesn't let states regulate credit report content.

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Wash. Justices Spurn Alaska Airlines' Worker Illness Stance

By Rachel Riley

The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday sided with an Alaska Airlines employee who caught COVID-19 while traveling on the job, rejecting the employer's attempt to distinguish an occupational disease covered by state workers' compensation law from any sickness that develops during a work trip.

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CareFirst Urges Ban On J&J Character Talk At Stelara Trial

By Cara Salvatore

Health insurer CareFirst is asking a Virginia federal judge to bar Johnson & Johnson from promoting its "good character" to a jury that will weigh class claims of anticompetitive conduct and patent fraud to extend market protection on the blockbuster autoimmune drug Stelara.

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Kaiser Faces $5.4M Suit In Colorado Over Push To Telehealth

By Zach Dupont

A Colorado mental health clinic claims that the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of Colorado violated state healthcare laws by terminating its agreement with the behavioral health facility early, disrupting care for more than 7,800 patients.

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Health Cos. Sent Google Private Patient Data, Suit Says

By Kelcey Caulder

A group of Georgia healthcare facilities has been hit with a proposed class action in federal court accusing the providers of disclosing patients' confidential health information to Google without consent through website tracking and data collection tools.

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Sutter Health Patients' Attys To Get Over $100M Fees, Costs

By Craig Clough

A California U.S. magistrate judge said Thursday that she is ready to grant final approval of a $228.5 million deal settling a 13-year case over claims that Sutter Health boosted costs by pushing all-or-nothing networks on insurers, which includes $75.4 million in attorney fees and over $28 million in litigation expenses.

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Ex-COO Says Yale New Haven Hospital Owes Him Nearly $1M

By Brian Steele

Yale New Haven Hospital owes its former chief operating officer more than $994,000 under a noncompete agreement that guarantees him regular payments, according to a Connecticut federal lawsuit claiming that the hospital is improperly withholding the money because he supposedly did not give enough notice of his resignation.

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Attys Spar Over Dismissal Motion In Nurse Strike Pay Suit

By Zach Dupont

A Colorado federal judge on Thursday questioned the parties on both sides of a complaint in determining if it has enough details to move forward in the lawsuit from nearly 40 nurses who claim they were not properly paid while temporarily working at Kaiser Permanente facilities in California during a 2023 strike.

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Family Sues UF Hospital Over Toddler's Potassium Overdose

By Carolina Bolado

The family of a 2-year-old who died at Shands Hospital at the University of Florida filed a lawsuit Thursday claiming the hospital staff made a number of preventable medical errors, including over-administering potassium, which led to a fatal heart attack.

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Deals Rumor Mill

Pfizer Matches Novo's $10B Metsera Bid, And Other Rumors

By Al Barbarino

Pfizer Inc. reportedly raised its offer for Metsera Inc. to match a $10 billion bid from Novo Nordisk Inc., as a bidding war and legal squabble play out between the drugmakers. Among other deal-related rumors, Apollo Global Management Inc. reportedly dropped its bid to take private pizza chain Papa Johns International Inc., and new developments emerged as Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. weighs potential sale options.

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Navigating DEA Quotas: Key To Psychedelics Industry Growth

As new compounds like DOI enter the Schedule I landscape, manufacturers who anticipate U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration quota regulations, and build quota management into their broader strategy, will be best equipped to meet the growing demand, say Kimberly Chew at Husch Blackwell and Jaime Dwight at Promega.

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Federal Acquisition Rules Get Measured Makeover

The Trump administration's promised overhaul of the Federal Acquisition Regulation is not a revolution in rules, but a meaningful recalibration of procurement practice that gives contracting officers more space to think, to tailor and to try, say attorneys at Mayer Brown.

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Series

Mindfulness Meditation Makes Me A Better Lawyer

Mindful meditation enables me to drop the ego, and in helping me to keep sight of what’s important, permits me to learn from the other side and become a reliable counselor, says Roy Wyman at Bass Berry.

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Lawmakers Rip Judges Over Anonymous High Court Criticism

By Ryan Boysen

Two Republican lawmakers have asked Chief Justice John Roberts to rein in judges who've anonymously criticized the U.S. Supreme Court's flurry of "shadow docket" rulings, but a full-on investigation appears unlikely.

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Atty Exits Bankruptcy Case Amid Judge Romance Fallout

By Emily Sawicki

The embattled wind-down trustee for defunct life insurance bond seller GWG Holdings in a Houston Chapter 11 case has resigned from the role amid the fallout from her secret romance with a then-bankruptcy judge in the Southern District of Texas.

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Trump Taps Ex-Kansas AG Deputy For DOJ Legal Policy Role

By Courtney Bublé

President Donald Trump has nominated Dan Burrows, a White House official and former chief deputy attorney general of Kansas, to be assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Policy.

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Goldstein Loses Bid To Trim Tax Charges Before Trial

By Jared Foretek

A Maryland federal judge Thursday handed SCOTUSblog co-founder Tom Goldstein a series of losses on pre-trial motions aimed at trimming the 22 federal tax charges he'll face at trial next year, ruling that many of the motions involved factual disputes fit for trial and keeping the government's case intact.

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Tom Girardi's Brother, Bankruptcy Trustee Settle Legal Fees

By Lauren Berg

The brother of disgraced attorney Tom Girardi and the trustee for their now-defunct law firm, Girardi Keese, have reached an agreement resolving John Girardi's claim seeking legal fees for cases he worked on after leaving the firm, the trustee told the California bankruptcy court.

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Atty Ordered Detained After Harassment Of BigLaw Attys

By Spencer Brewer

A Texas federal judge on Thursday ordered U.S. marshals to put an attorney accused of cyberstalking other attorneys at BigLaw firms in jail until trial, saying the attorney has continued to make harassing online posts while on pretrial release and didn't attend mandatory mental health treatment.

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Judge Mehta 'Still Digging Out' From Google, Oath Keepers

By Bryan Koenig

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta said Thursday he is still playing catch-up from a period during which his time was spent with virtually nothing but the Google search case and the prosecution of Oath Keepers charged with sedition and other crimes from the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

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DOJ Gives Comey Seized Materials, Balks At Grand Jury Docs

By Lauren Berg

The U.S. Department of Justice Thursday informed a Virginia federal court that it has handed over to former FBI Director James Comey materials seized under years-old search warrants, but it will challenge a magistrate judge's order to produce grand jury materials.

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Ex-DOJ Staffer Cleared After Tossing Sandwich At CBP Officer

By Elaine Briseño

A D.C. federal jury on Thursday found former U.S. Department of Justice employee Sean Dunn, who threw a Subway sandwich at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer, not guilty of misdemeanor assault.

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2nd Circ. Orders New Look At Trump's Hush Money Case

By Aaron Keller

In a published opinion, the Second Circuit on Thursday ordered a federal district judge to take a fresh look at President Donald Trump's attempt to move his New York hush money conviction to federal court, citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2024 presidential immunity ruling as grounds for reconsidering the case.

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Miss. Judge, US Atty Nominees Held Up In Committee

By Courtney Bublé

Consideration of judicial and U.S. attorney nominees for Mississippi has stalled in committee over tensions between senators that are unrelated to the nominations, according to the Senate Judiciary Committee chair's office.

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