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The Products Liability Practice Group represents numerous corporations in litigation
involving a wide variety of products in a broad spectrum of industries. This
includes extensive experience serving as national counsel, managing and coordinating
the defense of companies in nationwide multi-district mass tort litigation.
The Group represents clients throughout the United States and abroad in a large
number of products liability and toxic tort cases.
Kelley Drye's experience in defending products liability actions is unparalleled,
and we take pride in our proven ability to successfully resolve these matters in
practical and cost effective ways. Kelley Drye has represented many different types
of companies in products liability matters including chemical companies, machinery
manufacturers, pharmaceutical and medical device companies. Our clients have included
major corporations such as Novartis, The Dow Chemical Company, Union Carbide, MGA
Entertainment, Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Hercules, Bristol-Myers Squibb
Company, Exxon, Otis Elevator, Allergan, Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as numerous
smaller business enterprises. Our representations have involved a wide variety of
products and have included some of the largest and most complex products liability
and toxic tort litigations in history, including Phenylpropanolamine (PPA),
Semiconductor Industry, Breast Implant, Latex Glove, Agent Orange, Ethylene Oxide
and Asbestos litigations.
Our partners and associates have acted as in-house counsel to many of the Firm's
clients. In this capacity we have both supervised and conducted litigation on
a national and international scale and provided counseling services on litigation
avoidance, risk management, regulatory compliance, safety and health and related issues.
The services provided by the Products Liability Practice Group include all
aspects of pre-trial, trial and appellate work in State and Federal Courts,
including complex and multi-district litigation acting as local, regional and
National Coordinating Counsel. The Group develops and coordinates an
international network of medical and scientific experts in a wide area of
specialties resulting from our years of involvement in multi-jurisdictional
products liability litigation.
We have numerous risk identification and management counseling services, including
advising clients on viability of products and potential new products, risk of
product use based on medical developments, and creation of warning labels and
product safety programs. We have extensive experience with mediations, arbitrations
and other types of alternate dispute resolution, and also have experience in
representations before governmental bodies and administrative agencies in connection
with product recalls, safety standards, material safety data sheets. We have
also supervised and conducted internal corporate audits and investigations. Our international litigation
experience includes arbitrations before the London Court of International Arbitration,
the International Chamber of Commerce and International Claims Tribunals.
The products with which the Practice Group has experience include:
- Various chemicals and chemical by-products, including: PCBs; methyl
isocyanate; dioxin; formaldehyde; ethylene oxide; hydrogen sulfide; carbon
disulfide; acetone; acetylene; ethyl alcohol; polyurethanes; hydrocarbons;
toluene diisocyanate; polyvinyl chloride; glycol ethers; and dioxane.
- Semiconductor Industry chemicals, including: glycol ethers, acetone,
n-butyl acetate, isopropyl alcohol, positive and negative photoresists,
trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, acrylic polymers; formaldehyde;
cresol; acetaldehyde and epichlorohydrin.
- Herbicides, pesticides and agricultural chemicals, including Agent
Orange (2,4-D; 2,4,5-T), Temik, Carbaryl and Treflan.
- Asbestos
- Numerous pharmaceuticals such as Phenylpropanolamine (PPA), Accutane,
Oraflex, Hismanal, L-Tryptophan, Stadol, Prozac, DES, oral contraceptives,
anti-hypertensives and ulcer medications.
- Medical devices and other medical products, including: pacemakers; IUDs;
latex gloves; Pap smears; interventional cardiovascular devices, neurological
surgical devices and general surgical devices.
- Breast implants
- Various types of industrial machinery, such as printing presses,
machine tools, industrial knitting machines, slitting and converting equipment,
power press brakes and hand tools.
- Consumer products such as sport bicycles, fitness equipment and
dietary supplements.
Kelley Drye is on the cutting edge in the use of computerized litigation support
technology, document imaging, optical character recognition, work-product retrieval,
and computer graphic systems. We have also assisted some of our clients in the
development and integration of technology into their own in-house legal department
operations. As National Coordinating Counsel for clients, we have created secured
access Intranet web sites and document depositories to make correspondence,
information, documents, and pleadings available to the client, local counsel
and the Kelley Drye, resulting in a seamless and efficient defense.
Our experience with major cases, high volume class actions and nationwide multidistrict
litigation actions has given us the ability to offer clients excellent litigation
support technology. We have an in-house litigation support team that
ensures the continuous development of new tools to support large and complex
litigations. Utilizing a mix of off-the-shelf and custom products, our litigation
support team creates databases for managing document-intensive litigations,
linking images of the documents to searchable data indexing the documents. Such
databases result in significant cost savings over manual document review and
retrieval.
We also handle the electronic production of documents, wherein litigation documents
are organized, coded, scanned and produced electronically, saving substantial
paper-handling costs. In addition, this team is equipped to handle productions
of email and other electronic data, which has become integral to the exchange
of documents in most litigations. The litigation support team also offers extranet
capabilities for sharing information and documents with clients and co-counsel.
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