Lipitor MDL Court Grants Pfizer's Omnibus Summary Judgment Motion: No Evidence of Causation

For those of us who spend large chunks of our professional lives in mass tort MDLs, expressions like "settlement inventory" are ubiquitous. It is too easy to lose sight of the fact that these expressions put the rabbit in the hat, assuming that resourceful plaintiff lawyers will necessarily queue up for settlement payments at the end of the day and disregarding the fact that plaintiffs are supposed to be able to prove injury and causation before money changes hands. And so we were especially pleased to read last week's decisions in the Lipitor MDL, in which the cautious and relentlessly thorough MDL judge granted defendant Pfizer's omnibus summary judgment motion, dismissing all but a single newly-filed case, because the plaintiffs could not meet their burden of proving that Lipitor caused their diabetes. (There are two decisions relating to different dosages of Lipitor. You can read them here and here.)