Practice Areas & Industries: Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney's Products Liability and Mass Tort Litigation Group represents regional, national and international clients that manufacture and/or distribute a diverse cross-section of products and defendants in mass tort litigation. We routinely serve as national and statewide trial and coordinating counsel.

Whether a client faces a single challenge to an allegedly defective product, a class action or a coordinated series of filings throughout many jurisdictions, our Products Liability and Mass Tort Litigation Group offers substantive legal knowledge, procedural and strategic acumen and the ability to quickly marshal an experienced legal team appropriate to the challenge. Our litigators partner with the client to learn about the client's product and meet with the experts to learn the physiology of the diseases allegedly associated with the product and the epidemiology and other scientific issues involved in mounting a defense.

When clients are sued in multiple jurisdictions, substantial cost savings can be achieved by having one law firm and one lawyer or group of lawyers handle the litigation. The cost savings are not limited to the expense of lawyer time, but rather extend to the substantial client time to retain and educate new lawyers and coordinate litigation pending in different locations. Many clients prefer to call one law firm which understands their business and the products they sell instead of having many independent lawyers throughout the United States.

Lawyers in our Products Liability and Mass Tort Litigation Group are also commercial litigators, who bring with them a practical understanding of the demands of the business world in which our clients operate. These cases do not exist in a vacuum, and our attorneys understand that in personal injury and product liability litigation, a single adverse judgment can have disastrous short and long-term consequences to our clients.

Finally, our attorneys counsel clients about how to avoid the filing of personal injury, mass tort and product liability claims, and how to minimize the outcome of these claims in the event that they are brought. This may take the form of contract review, including drafting of terms and conditions relating to the sale or distribution of products, analysis of current product literature and warnings, and preventative evaluation of products concerning potential products liability exposure.

Representative Clients and Experience

With offices throughout the United States, we have handled personal injury, products liability, and other mass litigation involving the following representative clients and claims:

• Served as national trial counsel for a major automaker in asbestos personal injury litigation.
• Recently won a defense verdict in one such case filed by the widow and estate of a dealership mechanic who died of mesothelioma at age 58. The defense was premised on expert testimony in the fields of epidemiology, toxicology, risk assessment and pathology, the skillful cross examination of plaintiff's experts and evidence of alternative exposure.
• Played significant role in obtaining a Frye hearing and favorable ruling in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, holding that plaintiffs' experts' opinions that exposure to friction products causes asbestos disease "are novel and unsupported by generally accepted methodologies within the relevant scientific community."
• Routinely depose pathologists, toxicologists, epidemiologists, risk assessment and state of the art experts.
• Served as national litigation counsel for a manufacturer of natural rubber latex gloves in over 225 product liability claims pending in state and federal court (MDL proceedings) based on the alleged defective allergic nature of the gloves.
• Resolved hundreds of tenders of defense made by distributors against our glove manufacturer client.
• Represented a major insurance carrier in many declaratory judgment actions brought by insureds seeking coverage for the cleanup of hazardous waste Superfund sites, one case alone involving over 100 sites nationwide.

Litigation Support/Document Management

Our commitment to successful client service extends to our broad support and computer network that includes a force of experienced and committed paralegals and project assistants, and a state-of-the-art document storage and retrieval system. Through the use of Summation iBlaze, Version 2.7.1, software developed by Summation Legal Technologies, Inc., we can image, code, retrieve and analyze documents, transcripts, video and other forms of electronic data. In fact, Buchanan Ingersoll litigators have accessed and summarized as many as 1.2 million documents in a single case, and this technology has proven to be cost-effective in cases of all sizes and degrees of complexity. A database of this kind can, where appropriate, be loaded onto a secure internet website in order that the client, legal team, experts and, where appropriate, insurers, can view and search the documents, transcripts and pleadings from their laptops. In conjunction with our document retrieval and storage database, our legal teams also use Access Databases for case control purposes, which provides us with the ability to track a multitude of cases and important information about them and to generate status reports including information such as deadlines, parties, product identification, etc.

Trial Presentation Technology

The Firm extensively employs an in-trial software application, InData Trial Director/Deposition Director Suite 4.5. In conjunction with the Summation iBlaze software used during discovery, this software permits digitizing of evidence, projection of the evidence in the courtroom and the application of various forms of callout boxes, highlighting and video deposition replay to enhance judicial and jury appreciation of the evidence. We have complete software and hardware configurations for use of this technology at trial and employ Litigation Technology Coordinators and other staff skilled in the use of this technology, thereby eliminating the need for outsourcing any consulting, setup or operations aspects of the use of this technology and allowing us to maneuver on the fly at trial, if necessary.

Insurance Coverage Representation

Our attorneys have experience in working with insurance carriers to defend personal injury and products liability claims that are brought against clients. We can serve as first chair trial counsel throughout the country, or as national or regional coordinating counsel managing the litigation and supervising counsel located in geographic regions where Buchanan Ingersoll does not maintain offices. Where an insurance carrier has denied coverage for claims asserted, we are trained and have experience in litigating declaratory judgment actions.