Meet the Plaintiffs Lawyers Signing on to Help Gov'ts Sue Big Pharma Over Opioid Epidemic
A growing wave of plaintiffs lawyers are joining state and local governments in filing lawsuits against big pharmaceutical companies blaming them for the prescription opioid addiction epidemic and trying to recover taxpayer funds spent dealing with it.
May 18, 2017 at 02:52 PM
11 minute read
By the end of the year, Paul Hanly Jr. predicts he will have sued pharmaceutical companies in more than half of New York's 62 counties, alleging the drug manufacturers deceptively marketed opioid painkillers such as OxyContin and Percocet.
Hanly, a shareholder in the New York office of national firm Simmons Hanly Conroy , is part of a growing wave of plaintiffs lawyers who are bringing cases against major pharmaceutical companies at a time when the country is grappling with what many health officials call a crisis of addiction to prescription painkillers and heroin, which has been linked to opioid abuse by the federal government. While these lawsuits have been around for a while—Kentucky filed one back in 2007 that settled for $24 million in 2015—there has been a significant uptick in filings in the past several months.
Plaintiffs lawyers in these recent cases across the United States are teaming with state and local governments, suing Big Pharma through contingency-fee agreements. Hanly already has filed four cases in New York state courts in Buffalo, Binghamton, Central Islip and Goshen on behalf of Erie, Broome, Suffolk and Orange counties, respectively, and he said he plans to bring suits for several more municipalities in New York in the upcoming days. The most recent suit against the pharmaceutical companies was filed by Hanly on May 11 in Orange County.
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