Latest / The Jon and Marc Podcast / The Anatomy of a Defective Device: Inside the Bard PowerPort MDL Strategy

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The Anatomy of a Defective Device: Inside the Bard PowerPort MDL Strategy · The Jon and Marc Podcast

• 0:00
  Mass tort director. What does that person do?
• 0:03
  Yeah, great question, right. You know, sometimes one of the
• 0:07
  really cool things about our firms, what makes the decision
• 0:10
  for us is whether it's a good 'cause I think that's one of the
• 0:14
  reasons I really like being at Lanier in particular.
• 0:17
  And do then go to like a secret meeting when Mark's house and
• 0:20
  you're like, these are the ones. Absolutely, yeah.
• 0:24
  No, there's like a password to go to the door and everything.
• 0:42
  Back on the John Mark podcast, we have today a very, very
• 0:46
  special guest, the Mass Torts director, Rebecca Phillips of
• 0:51
  the Lanier Law Firm. Hey, thanks for joining us.
• 0:54
  Yeah. Thanks for having me.
• 0:55
  I appreciate it. We are here at MTMP in Las Vegas
• 0:58
  at the Bellagio. Rebecca agreed to join us on
• 1:01
  this podcast. We've been talking for a while,
• 1:04
  been working together for a while, but actually getting the
• 1:07
  opportunity to sit here and dive into probably a little bit more
• 1:10
  technical topic than people are used to.
• 1:12
  We're going to talk about Bard power port.
• 1:14
  We're going to talk about the life cycle of a mass tort.
• 1:17
  Appreciate you being here with us today.
• 1:18
  Yeah, thanks again for having me.
• 1:20
  Couple questions for you. OK, Mass tort director, what
• 1:24
  does that person do? Yeah.
• 1:27
  Great question, right. This is even internally in the
• 1:30
  firm when we have meetings, I'm kind of explaining it.
• 1:33
  So there's really two big parts to the job.
• 1:36
  One part is vetting cases when they come into the firm.
• 1:40
  So as you might imagine, lots of people like to work with Mark
• 1:45
  Lanier and the Lanier Law Firm team.
• 1:48
  And so people approach us all the time with new ideas and new
• 1:51
  cases. And if it's a mass tort case,
• 1:54
  then I'm the person who will look at it a little bit of
• 1:56
  secret. If you don't know me well, I'm a
• 1:58
  huge nerd. I went to law school at Yale.
• 2:02
  So I like to get into the nitty gritty and the details and, and
• 2:06
  look at things. So that's part number one of my
• 2:08
  job. Part number 2.
• 2:10
  My job, not nerd side of the coin, is networking with people
• 2:15
  who refers cases, making sure that they feel well taken care
• 2:19
  of, making sure that we're doing a good job there and yeah,
• 2:22
  talking to people. Like you, I'm assuming you guys
• 2:25
  get a ton of stuff or you personally get a ton of stuff
• 2:28
  put across your plate. What does that process look like
• 2:30
  from a vetting? And do you then go to like a
• 2:33
  secret meeting in Mark's house and you're like, these are the
• 2:35
  ones? Absolutely.
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  Yeah. No, there's like his password to
• 2:39
  go to the door and everything. The Ouija board.
• 2:41
  No. It's actually pretty informal.
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  It depends on the process, right?
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  I mean, sometimes we see cases that come in that they've been
• 2:49
  through trial and we know it's a viable case and all we got to do
• 2:53
  is make some decisions about whether it's the right thing to
• 2:55
  do, whether it's a good business decision, all that kind of
• 2:57
  stuff. And we go, you know, it's people
• 3:00
  who we're friends with, who we've worked with, we know them.
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  And then other times it's somebody calling who says, I've
• 3:06
  been seeing a lot of these kind of cases come in.
• 3:09
  I don't know if it's a really good mass tort or not.
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  And we have to look at it. We have to look at the science.
• 3:17
  And so we, I mean, me, I will look at the science and I'll
• 3:22
  say, is this viable scientifically?
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  Is there a doubling of any risk? You know, that's one of the
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  threshold questions I'll look at.
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  Do we have personal jurisdiction in the case?
• 3:30
  I'll look at? Are there any preemption issues?
• 3:32
  I'll look at a number of things to try to figure out just
• 3:36
  practically whether it's viable, and then I'll look at it as a
• 3:39
  business decision, right? I mean, you guys know you do
• 3:42
  mass torts, so obviously if there's going to be 25 cases out
• 3:46
  there, then that's not a great mass tort or this is a great
• 3:50
  case, but the defendant is going bankrupt and I'm not going to be
• 3:54
  able to get but 1/4 for each of my clients.
• 3:57
  That's not going to be worth it for anybody.
• 3:59
  You know, sometimes one of the really cool things about our
• 4:01
  firm is what makes the decision for us is whether it's a good
• 4:05
  cause. And I think that's one of the
• 4:09
  reasons I really like being at Lanier in particular, and
• 4:13
  working with Lanier in particular, because he really
• 4:17
  sort of puts his money where his values are.
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  There was a case, for example, one time I wanted to bring into
• 4:22
  the firm. It wasn't a mass tort.
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  It was a constitutional 1983 case, and I was right on the
• 4:28
  edge of trial. They needed trial counsel and I
• 4:30
  wanted to go try it, but it was going to be a hard case and we
• 4:33
  were going to have to put up probably a couple, $100,000
• 4:37
  ended up being more to go try and just to pay for the experts
• 4:41
  to pay for the trial team living in California while we tried
• 4:44
  this case to pay for all of it. At the end of the day, Dara said
• 4:48
  it's the right thing to do, so we're going to go do that.
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  And we won and it was great and we ended up making money out the
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  case, but you don't always know that on the front end, so.
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  I feel like that's a lot of pressure, the position you're in
• 4:59
  of vetting those because not only is it a lot of resources
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  from the firm's perspective, but if I don't know, your firm does
• 5:05
  have a certain weight to decisions that are made that if
• 5:08
  you say you're going after, people might start advertising
• 5:11
  and sending them to you. So you can have a lot of wheels
• 5:14
  in motion by saying that you are are going after a.
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  Particular case exactly. And luckily I should say that
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  it's not just me. I will vet it, I will make my
• 5:22
  recommendation, and then our firm managers will weigh in on
• 5:26
  it. And there's a lot of experience
• 5:27
  in that room when you know things are being discussed to
• 5:30
  make sure that we're doing the right thing.
• 5:32
  What is a case that came across your desk that you vetted and
• 5:36
  you're like, we, this is not one that we should go after.
• 5:39
  Oh man. OK, so do you all remember the
• 5:42
  eye drops case that we see? Your eye drops case.
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  So when those came in, everybody was super excited about that
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  because the injuries were horrible.
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  And of course, I mean, what was going on in that case?
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  Of course something needed to be done.
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  This needed to be corrected in the market.
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  But when I looked at the law, I really thought this is going to
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  be most viable in California because California is one of the
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  few states where you can hold the distributors accountable
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  based on just what the underlying law is.
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  And everywhere else, the main manufacturer who was going to be
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  at fault. I don't know if we're going to
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  be able to get a cent out of those people just because of the
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  way that the law worked and because of where they were
• 6:25
  located and all sorts of things. And so at the end of the day, we
• 6:28
  ended up taking only California clients and helping those
• 6:31
  people, and we were able to help those people.
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  That was a decision that if we hadn't made the decision to keep
• 6:37
  it really narrow, only represent these particular clients, we
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  would have gone out and got, you know, as many cases as we could
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  and not been able to to work with it.
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  Yeah, that's a pretty low volume mass tort it was.
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  Very low volume and I think there wasn't even
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  centralization, but we went after the California cases.
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  We got some California cases and we helped some people.
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  You're in leadership on board, right?
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  What was it about that case that checked the boxes for you?
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  You're like, this is one that we really should be investing time,
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  money, resources in. The story on the bar case is a
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  guy who I learned to be a plaintiff's lawyer under his
• 7:13
  name is Alex Barlow. He is my mentor in plaintiff
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  world. I came over from the defense
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  side and I did not know what I was doing.
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  I I just remember this one time on the defense side when you get
• 7:25
  requests for production, you object to everything.
• 7:28
  You give them nothing, right? You just object to everything.
• 7:31
  Pages, 25 pages of objections only we're giving you nothing.
• 7:34
  They asked the plaintiff for some discovery in this case that
• 7:36
  have been instead, and I wrote my 25 pages of objections.
• 7:40
  We won't give you nothing. And Alex came into my office and
• 7:43
  he said they do things differently on the plaintiff
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  side. We're going to give them
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  basically everything they're asking for because we don't have
• 7:51
  anything to hide. So I learned real quick that it
• 7:53
  was different. And Alex taught me that.
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  He was a great mentor and he approached me about this case
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  and he told me about the science and he told me about the team
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  that they were putting together, the injustice that's happening
• 8:07
  right now of people who are really vulnerable.
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  I mean, this case concerns cancer patients.
• 8:13
  They are so vulnerable and I can't imagine just as the worst
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  possible time in my life when I'm fighting for my life, having
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  to also on top of that deal with a life threatening injury.
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  From a device that's supposed to be helping you get from.
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  A Trojan horse that is supposed to be helping me.
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  I mean, that's exactly, you know, what's happening here.
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  So that's how the board case came to us.
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  And when we read it all out, it looks good.
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  It looks like something need to be done and here we are.
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  And so you are on leadership for that Master?
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  Yeah. And one of the Co leads, there's
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  three Co leads in this case and I am one of the Co leads.
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  It's my first experience being a Co lead in a litigation.
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  There's a lot to learn. We've got about 20 or 25 firms
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  participating in this and you know, knock on wood, so far so
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  good. I think we're doing all right.
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  There's about 2000 cases filed. We're about to get the case
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  specific briefing behind us and we're about to go to trial in
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  2026, so. The first bellwether.
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  The first bellwether, well actually 6 bellwethers will
• 9:17
  happen in 2026, yeah. So if you're not familiar with
• 9:22
  this tort, the signature injuries are a fracture of the
• 9:26
  catheter which can usually go into the patients heart.
• 9:30
  If it embolizes, it'll go into the patients heart, do some
• 9:33
  damage, they have to have it removed.
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  Scary situation. The catheter can get infected,
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  and when it does get infected, it's a bloodstream infection.
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  At the very minimum requires removal of the port which the
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  patient needs for chemotherapy typically.
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  Is because it's supposed to be close to their heart so that a
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  medicine can circulate through the blood, right?
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  So, so there's that or the port can thrombose and when you get
• 9:58
  thrombus the embolizes you end up with pulmonary embolism also
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  life threatening. So these injuries from these
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  ports can be very serious at the time in the patient's life when
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  they do not need to be dealing with serious complications.
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  And the most remarkable thing about this case to me is that
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  since at least, and this is being generous, but since at
• 10:17
  least the early 2010's, there has been a solution to these
• 10:21
  problems. And Bard and Becton Dickinson
• 10:24
  never implemented the solutions to those problems.
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  It's really, in my opinion, a factor.
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  Just the fact that they control, since about 2006, they've
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  controlled 70 to 75% of the port market.
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  And if you just limit that to the United States, it's even
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  more They just don't have an economic incentive to make these
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  ports better. They didn't learn their lesson
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  from hernia mesh. Apparently not.
• 10:51
  Yeah. I'm not an antitrust lawyer, but
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  I do know that when a company controls more than 70% of the
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  market for a given period of time, we start to ask questions
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  about that and a little surprised those questions
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  haven't already been raised here.
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  With many mass torts, we see this cause and effect scenario,
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  right? In Bard, it's if you have the
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  power port, it gets infected or it moves and it or breaks and
• 11:18
  and then it causes X issue, right?
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  There's a lot of other either medicines or medical devices
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  that are known to cause issues for those people who are
• 11:29
  listening who maybe are not as familiar with mass torts as as
• 11:32
  you are, what makes barred power ports specifically become a
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  consolidated tort versus all these other drugs that have
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  these side effects and issues that aren't necessarily things
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  that people could? A lot of the times what you're
• 11:50
  talking about, I think is a failure to warn claim.
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  If the drug that you're talking about, you know, has a warning
• 11:57
  that, you know, for example, this particular drug can cause a
• 12:00
  seizure and then it does cause a seizure.
• 12:02
  You may even still have a lawsuit in that case if they
• 12:05
  said, you know, seizures are rare, don't worry about it.
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  But actually 50% of the people who take this, take the stroke,
• 12:12
  have a seizure, right? So that's a failure to warn
• 12:14
  case. This case is a little bit
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  different of a theory is a failure to warn aspect of it.
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  But the case that I'm most focused on is the defect aspect
• 12:23
  of it. You can't outworn A defect.
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  A product, if it's supposed to do a thing and a consumer
• 12:28
  expects it to do a thing, and it doesn't do the thing if it's
• 12:31
  unreasonably dangerous, then that is an effective product.
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  Measure the product had a label on it will probably break.
• 12:39
  Exactly. Well, and look, in this case,
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  it's a coin flip as to whether your device breaks or not.
• 12:45
  I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day saying,
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  you know, that they made these cancer patients play Russian
• 12:51
  roulette. And then I thought to myself,
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  no, it's worse than that. There's a study out there.
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  It's the Khalid study, and it says that 60% of these devices
• 13:00
  fail either by fracture or by infection or by thrombosis.
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  So it is truly your odds are worse than a coin flip as to
• 13:08
  whether or not your port's going to fail.
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  And if they can fix this problem, they need to fix this
• 13:14
  problem, they can fix this problem.
• 13:17
  The product that controls 80% of the market fails 60% of the time
• 13:23
  is insane. Yep.
• 13:24
  And if you look at the numbers, there's just a crazy amount of
• 13:28
  these cases out there. I'm going to try to remember it
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  off the top of my head. It's something like 400,000 of
• 13:33
  these ports are implanted every year.
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  If Bard controls 70, and that's conservative, I think if Bard
• 13:40
  controls 70 to 75% of that market, you can see how many
• 13:43
  that is. And then if 60% of them fail, I
• 13:46
  think you end up with a number like 180,000 or something and
• 13:49
  that's per year. I didn't go to Yale, but I think
• 13:51
  that math is pretty close. The math Maths.
• 13:54
  Yeah, it's a serious problem. A lot.
• 13:56
  And there's, there are studies out there that will say that
• 14:00
  this is a problem that doesn't just cost, it's not just hurting
• 14:03
  the patient physically, but it's actually costing the US
• 14:07
  healthcare system billions of dollars every year because of
• 14:11
  the cost to say Medicare to treat these kind of things and
• 14:15
  the product being defective. So it's costing a lot of money.
• 14:19
  When I say billions of dollars, let me be clear.
• 14:21
  I believe the study that I'm thinking of is of all Central
• 14:25
  line catheters and I think ports may only be, I think 25% of
• 14:30
  central line catheters. And so 25% of billions dollars
• 14:34
  is still a huge problem. And that's not to mention I
• 14:38
  think that same study says that it cost something like 25,000
• 14:41
  lives every year. That's insane.
• 14:44
  It causing more of an injury to someone who's already having
• 14:46
  cancer, then you have to try and treat that injury on top of them
• 14:49
  already having cancer. Just has to make exponentially
• 14:51
  more expensive to do so as well to remediate the issue.
• 14:55
  It's not good. Is there an appropriate vetting
• 14:58
  process in place so that devices like this don't make their way
• 15:03
  to market? Yeah.
• 15:04
  So that's a great question. For medical devices, there's
• 15:08
  something called the 510K process and you may have heard
• 15:11
  of this. All right, then we'll talk about
• 15:14
  it a little bit. So Mark's like, yeah.
• 15:17
  So when I talked about preemption earlier, if device
• 15:21
  goes through what's called the pre market approval process, PMA
• 15:25
  process for short simplifying here.
• 15:28
  But what that means is that there's been some clinical
• 15:31
  research done, the FDA has looked at it.
• 15:33
  The FDA has said, yeah, we are going to approve this device and
• 15:38
  say that it is safe and effective, right, generally.
• 15:42
  But if it goes through the 510K process, well that says there's
• 15:47
  other devices like this on Oh. I've heard about this.
• 15:50
  There's other good stuff like hit this on the market and the
• 15:54
  company is saying on my honor, this is just like those other
• 15:57
  devices. And so you need to go ahead and
• 16:00
  clear, not approve, but clear this device to go out onto the
• 16:04
  market. And so these devices were
• 16:06
  cleared through that 510K process and never formally
• 16:11
  approved by the FDA. Would be careful with my
• 16:14
  questioning here. Did Bard claim, or does Bard
• 16:18
  claim that they appropriately vetted and tested the device?
• 16:22
  Of course they will. Yeah, of course they will.
• 16:24
  They will say that these devices are safe and that they save
• 16:28
  lives and that they need to be on the market.
• 16:31
  And we're not saying that ports need to be pulled off the
• 16:34
  market. That's not our case here at all
• 16:36
  Our case is you haven't updated these catheters for more than 20
• 16:40
  years. And Can you imagine other
• 16:42
  medical technology that has not been updated for more than 20
• 16:46
  years when it could save lives to do so?
• 16:49
  It's it's insane, you. Don't have to update if it's
• 16:51
  working but if it's failing 60% time might you know maybe
• 16:54
  upgrade it. In Bard you are one of the Co
• 16:57
  leads. What are like the roles and
• 16:58
  responsibilities that you have? Make sure everything goes well.
• 17:03
  Don't fail, right? So to work with all the other
• 17:07
  attorneys who are working on the tort and to be the person, at
• 17:11
  the end of the day, who's responsible for everything.
• 17:13
  So there's three of us who are standing up in court at most of
• 17:17
  the status conferences with the judge and answering to the judge
• 17:21
  for everything that goes on in the case, arguing everything
• 17:23
  that's going on in the case, just kind of generally being
• 17:26
  responsible for everything. At the end of the day, we're in
• 17:29
  front of Judge David Campbell out in Phoenix, AZ.
• 17:33
  He's the former head of the Federal Rules Committee.
• 17:37
  He is sharp and he is fair. I laugh really hard one time in
• 17:42
  court and I shouldn't have because he came in and he goes,
• 17:46
  I haven't had much time to review the party's papers.
• 17:50
  So, you know, let me make sure I've got this right.
• 17:52
  And then he proceeds to know the papers better than the party
• 17:55
  this year with them. Like he's, he's very sharp, he's
• 17:58
  very good, he's very fair. We we really enjoy being in
• 18:02
  front of them. Of the six bellwethers coming up
• 18:06
  in 2026, are any of them your cases?
• 18:08
  Yes. So we have two that we are going
• 18:11
  to be trying. One of them is a fracture case.
• 18:15
  Mark will be trying that one. We really love our client in
• 18:18
  that case, and she's been very injured and very wrong, so we're
• 18:21
  excited to go get some justice for her.
• 18:24
  The other case is a defendant's pick.
• 18:26
  I'll put it that way. And I'm going to try that one
• 18:29
  myself. I'm going to try it with a team
• 18:31
  of a couple other people who I really love.
• 18:33
  But yeah, I'll be doing that one.
• 18:34
  So it's exciting. The firm is in a lot of mass
• 18:37
  torts. How did you then decide to try
• 18:39
  to be on leadership for this one versus other ones?
• 18:42
  We typically like to be in leadership.
• 18:43
  If we're going to be in a case, our speciality is litigating it,
• 18:47
  right. Our speciality is going to
• 18:49
  trial. And so I know a lot of firms
• 18:51
  will just get cases and they don't want to be in the fray and
• 18:55
  they want to wait until the end and then get involved in the
• 18:57
  settlement process. That's not our MO.
• 19:00
  We like to be in the fight, in the fray and making sure that
• 19:05
  what's getting done is getting done well so that when Mark
• 19:09
  wants to try these cases, at the end of the day, it's ready for
• 19:12
  him to just pick up and run with it.
• 19:14
  I personally like the Bard case. It's very clear what has
• 19:17
  happened. It's a cohort of people that are
• 19:21
  all very similar that all have had the same issue.
• 19:24
  It's a very very clear mass tort.
• 19:26
  I think it makes it just very linear and clean for firms who
• 19:30
  are looking whether or not they want to be involved in it or
• 19:33
  not. For firms that are local and
• 19:36
  maybe every once in a while decide to invest in a mass tort,
• 19:39
  would you recommend that this is one that they should consider
• 19:43
  getting involved in? Do you have to be more
• 19:45
  experienced in order to move into this?
• 19:48
  Because it's not just simple like take this drug had this
• 19:51
  problem. I do think that this is an easy
• 19:53
  case to get involved in and there's so much calculus that is
• 19:56
  going on in my mind right now as to whether or not this is a tort
• 20:00
  that people should get involved in.
• 20:02
  It is hard for me to say what that calculus is for everybody,
• 20:06
  but I do think it's a good case. I'll tell you this, The one
• 20:09
  thing that I think people are a little bit scared of in getting
• 20:12
  into this case is that a lot of the injuries are infection or
• 20:17
  port related thrombus. And I think in some other mass
• 20:20
  torts like TBM, when people saw an infection, they went that's
• 20:25
  low value maybe, right? We do not view the case like
• 20:28
  that at all. This is a person who has cancer.
• 20:32
  This is a person who's getting a catheter related bloodstream
• 20:36
  infection. So that's the signature injury.
• 20:38
  So you already have attribution of that bloodstream infection to
• 20:42
  the catheter typically in your medical records when you get
• 20:45
  them. And you know, any infection for
• 20:47
  somebody who has a bloodstream infection, for someone who has
• 20:51
  cancer, that's life threatening, you know, at the very least
• 20:54
  they're going to have to have a removal of this board catheter.
• 20:58
  It just seems to be the standard of care.
• 21:00
  So that's the situation with the infection cases.
• 21:02
  And for that reason I think they're quite serious.
• 21:05
  They're real cases. I will say from a marketing
• 21:07
  perspective, one of the challenges we have with medical
• 21:10
  devices, it's very similar to transvaginal mesh is people will
• 21:13
  raise their hand that they've been affected.
• 21:15
  People don't know what is implanted in them.
• 21:18
  The manufacturer where they, I had one that had an issue.
• 21:21
  So they're they call in there, see an ad, but they don't know
• 21:24
  what the actual manufacturer was of that power port or that
• 21:26
  transvaginal. You don't know until you pull
• 21:28
  the record. I don't know about you.
• 21:29
  If I have any surgery done and anything's going in.
• 21:32
  I'm not asking what the brand is.
• 21:34
  Yeah. Here's the good news for the
• 21:36
  people who are marketing is that Bar controlled 70 to 75% of the
• 21:40
  market just like 2006 and the other company that controlled
• 21:44
  about 15% of the market was Angio Dynamics.
• 21:48
  Now my firm is not involved in the Angio Dynamics MDL.
• 21:52
  We are not taking those cases. We're not pursuing those cases,
• 21:55
  but there are firms out there who are interested in, you know,
• 21:59
  pursuing cases against angiodynamics as well.
• 22:02
  Is it similar injuries just different manufacturer?
• 22:05
  Similar. So our position in the Bard Port
• 22:10
  MDL is that Angiodynamics actually has one design at least
• 22:14
  that is a safer alternative design because they made a
• 22:17
  thromboresistant catheter. I think it hit the market in
• 22:20
  late 2013 or early 2014. When you have thromboresistance,
• 22:24
  you're going to naturally have some infection resistance there.
• 22:27
  So they put a better product on the market in the early twenty
• 22:32
  10s. We're at MTMP, so I have to ask,
• 22:35
  like what is buzzing around that you've heard about that maybe
• 22:39
  something that at least piques your interest that you are
• 22:41
  thinking about just learning more about and haven't made a
• 22:44
  decision on yet? I'm really excited to hear more
• 22:47
  about these Roblox cases. We we have been hearing.
• 22:51
  Everyone's talking about it. Some buzz around roadblocks.
• 22:53
  This is against the minors right?
• 22:55
  This like sexual assaults. I know the attorneys general are
• 22:58
  getting involved in it. Some of them have filed some
• 23:00
  cases already. And I saw it was either today or
• 23:04
  very recently that I think the Florida Attorney General is
• 23:07
  looking at not just civil prosecution, but criminal as
• 23:11
  well. So that's very interesting.
• 23:13
  I find it interesting that you bring that one up because I had
• 23:17
  a play date at my house this weekend.
• 23:19
  I have a 7 year old and a 10 year old and I do not let my
• 23:22
  children touch Roblox. I know about all the bad stuff.
• 23:25
  I do not let them touch Roblox. And I was talking to the other
• 23:28
  parents and they're all talking about their kids are all playing
• 23:31
  Roblox. And one of them said, I just
• 23:34
  can't get it away from her. But she was playing the other
• 23:37
  day and she said grandma, grandma, this person told me to
• 23:43
  say and do this stuff. And then the grandmother talked
• 23:48
  to her about was going and it was exactly the fact pattern
• 23:51
  that we're hearing about everybody talk about.
• 23:53
  I'm like, this is like way too close to home just having people
• 23:57
  over my house. And there were kids swimming in
• 23:58
  the pool. Like we just had the opportunity
• 24:00
  to talk and like the education that I was able to supply them
• 24:03
  with to understand, like this is not an isolated situation.
• 24:06
  Yeah. So I can't imagine.
• 24:08
  I mean, even just talking about it in our office, right.
• 24:10
  I know that people have brought up their own stories exactly
• 24:14
  like you're doing right now. And so I can't imagine once they
• 24:17
  get into discovery in this case, what they're going to find about
• 24:20
  how many parents tried to get in touch, tried to tell them what
• 24:24
  was going on and they just looked the other way.
• 24:26
  I think it's going to be massive punitive damages discovery
• 24:30
  territory. Do you think that this
• 24:32
  encroaches on any of the 230 issues that like the social
• 24:37
  media litigation? Yes, we've been doing real well
• 24:41
  against 230 challenges and I know that there's a team that's
• 24:44
  already been put together to look at those issues in this
• 24:46
  case and they feel good. What else at MTMP are you doing
• 24:51
  here? We're we're having a
• 24:51
  conversation, you're learning about other litigations, but
• 24:54
  what is like a 2 day stint at MTMP look like for you?
• 24:57
  Oh man, y'all know Sadie Turner, right?
• 25:00
  She's the most amazing case manager at our firm and she
• 25:03
  works with me on everything. And she comes to this conference
• 25:07
  and we split up the schedule. So I'm like, I need to go to
• 25:11
  this little talk that's going to be happening over here and that
• 25:14
  little talk that's happening over there.
• 25:15
  And as you know, there's multiple tracks running at the
• 25:17
  same time so one person can possibly attend everything if
• 25:20
  they needed to. And so Sadie and divvy up the
• 25:23
  schedule between what we need to hear and she'll go take
• 25:26
  fantastic notes and I'll run around and do things like talk
• 25:30
  to you guys, just talk about the bar cases, make connections with
• 25:35
  our referral attorneys, sit in on the sessions where I'm able
• 25:37
  to. I know Mark is talking later
• 25:39
  today and tomorrow morning. I definitely want to go catch
• 25:42
  that. That's it.
• 25:43
  That's what I'm doing. So 2 questions for people who
• 25:46
  would want to come to mass or make perfect work.
• 25:47
  That's the first ones coming up. What advice do you have for them
• 25:51
  to make it a successful trip? You know, it can be very
• 25:54
  overwhelming. You've been to how many of these
• 25:56
  now? Yeah, what?
• 25:58
  But what advice do you have people to get the most out of
• 26:00
  this? Oh man, definitely grab somebody
• 26:03
  who has been and who knows the lay of the land because there's
• 26:07
  so much to see and do that it's overwhelming.
• 26:10
  I'm sure you guys know. The first one we went to in my
• 26:12
  head was spinning. Absolutely a small firm that
• 26:16
  does one offs that sometimes gets.
• 26:17
  In some cases that could be mass torts.
• 26:20
  Well, then you definitely want to make some connections with
• 26:23
  people like our firm or people like Pap's firm or you know,
• 26:26
  whoever, because I think their main goal is going to be able to
• 26:30
  work with us in a Co counsel capacity, right?
• 26:32
  And so if that's what they want to get out of it, they need to
• 26:35
  be, you know, finding us at the talks and making those
• 26:38
  connections and and having people introduce them.
• 26:41
  For somebody like me, I've got people who I work with on these
• 26:44
  cases who I want to meet up with and have those meetings.
• 26:48
  You know, I think it just depends really, you know, what
• 26:50
  do you want to get out of it at the end of the day, what's your
• 26:52
  interest here? And you can find somebody who's
• 26:54
  been here and done that and they can help you map it out.
• 26:58
  If someone wanted to be, you know, the Co counselor
• 27:00
  relationship with Lanier, how do they go about breaching that
• 27:03
  conversation with? Yeah, just e-mail me or come say
• 27:06
  hi, right? It's my emails,
• 27:07
  rebecca.phillips@lanierlawfirm.com. And I'm happy to talk to
• 27:12
  anybody. There are no stupid questions,
• 27:14
  by the way. I have people reach out to me
• 27:16
  all the time. They're like, I don't know if
• 27:17
  this is a good idea or not. You don't have to fully vet the
• 27:19
  case. I'll do that.
• 27:21
  That's my job and we'll just have the conversation about it.
• 27:24
  We come across a lot of personal injury attorneys who are asking
• 27:30
  us as they start to dip their toes into mass torts, like what
• 27:33
  should I get into? And I think.
• 27:35
  I think the exact language they use.
• 27:37
  What should I get into? What should I get into?
• 27:39
  And I would say that anything that Rebecca is in that the
• 27:44
  linear law firm is in has been clearly adequately vetted and
• 27:48
  has has great leadership behind it.
• 27:51
  Stellar trial team behind it. That's our advice for you guys
• 27:55
  watching at home. If you were coming across
• 27:57
  something, reach out to Rebecca and have her vet it for you.
• 27:59
  That's so nice. Thank you, John.
• 28:01
  Yeah. Of course, of course, anything
• 28:03
  that you want to leave our guests with before we wrap up.
• 28:06
  Just, you know, thanks for listening and please do reach
• 28:10
  out if you want to work with us. We always like to work with good
• 28:14
  people on good causes, and we're here to help.
• 28:16
  Yeah, I would say that's that's probably like the trend of
• 28:19
  guests on our podcast too. It's like we just talked to good
• 28:22
  people. Rebecca is good people.
• 28:24
  Thank you for watching and we will see you next time in the
• 28:26
  John and Mark podcast. Thank you, Rebecca.