Our Litigators of the Week, Tarek Ismail of Goldman Ismail Tomaselli Brennan & Baum and Andrew Bayman of King & Spalding, led teams representing GlaxoSmithKline and Boehringer Ingelheim respectively in the first trial considering claims that the discontinued heartburn drug Zantac causes cancer. Last week, after three weeks of trial and four hours of deliberations, a jury in Cook County Circuit Court rejected an Illinois woman’s claim that the drug caused her colon cancer.
The defense verdict comes more than two years after U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg in West Palm Beach, Florida, ruled that plaintiffs’ experts in the federal Zantac multidistrict litigation employed “unreliable methodologies” and took “analytical leaps” from existing data, effectively dismissing 50,000 claims.
