Product Liability & Mass Torts
With their reputations and billions of dollars on the line, leading companies rely on O’Melveny to tackle their biggest product-liability cases.
The Threat of Mass Arbitration: How Companies Can Avoid Becoming the Next Target
With their reputations and billions of dollars on the line, leading companies rely on O’Melveny to tackle their biggest product-liability cases.
The Threat of Mass Arbitration: How Companies Can Avoid Becoming the Next Target
Clients trust us with their most significant litigation, including traditional product-liability claims as well as consumer protection, False Claims Act, and public-nuisance claims. We have fought these cases to victory at trial, achieving first-of-their-kind outcomes; and on appeal, we have obtained the reversal of more than US$2.5 billion in adverse judgments for our clients.
We have successfully defended thousands of individual suits, government actions, and consumer class actions across the US and in an array of industries, including pharmaceuticals and medical devices, food and beverage, consumer electronics, automotive, energy and utilities, and industrial equipment.
We have served as lead national counsel in dozens of multidistrict litigation proceedings involving allegedly defective products, and we routinely defend clients in bet-the-company cases, investigations, and aggregated litigation brought by federal agencies and state attorneys general, including liability claims stemming from adverse medical events, plane crashes, environmental disasters, and oil spills.
Because significant product-liability litigation often invites scrutiny from state attorneys general or other government entities, we offer clients a multidisciplinary team of veteran litigators and former senior state attorney general officials who can help navigate the national landscape of increased enforcement and expanded attorney general authority. O’Melveny has handled some of the highest-profile AG-led trials in the last decade and has obtained almost US$2 billion in appellate reversals for the firm’s clients involved in litigation brought by AGs.
Won summary judgment on preemption grounds in multidistrict litigation and a California coordinated proceeding involving more than 530 cases accusing Amylin of failing to warn that its Type 2 diabetes drug allegedly causes pancreatic cancer.
- Negotiated a global resolution of claims from 48 states and more than 3,000 municipalities accusing pharmaceutical manufacturers of causing the opioid-abuse crisis.
- With US$50 billion on the line, we convinced a California judge that four local governments could not expand public-nuisance laws to address alleged opioid-related harms.
- Convinced the Oklahoma Supreme Court to reverse a trial court’s ruling that called for our client to pay US$465 million for nuisance abatement.
Won a full defense verdict as part of a multi-firm team in a hard-fought product-liability trial over pelvic mesh. The victory came despite the judge entering an issue-preclusion ruling based on findings from a prior trial and instructing the jury to consider numerous, prejudicial facts against our client as established in the case.
Serve as national appellate counsel for more than eight years in pelvic mesh product liability litigation—one of the largest mass torts in US history. We have successfully coordinated our clients' appellate strategy in cases across the country, and our team has delivered victories at the forefront of product liability law.
Served as lead trial counsel to Sempra Energy and subsidiary Southern California Gas Company in defending personal-injury and business claims brought by 36,000 individual plaintiffs and various real estate developers after the October 2015 leak at a gas-storage facility in Los Angeles. We negotiated both a US$1.8 billion agreement to globally resolve the individual plaintiffs’ claims and a series of smaller settlements with real estate developers.
Representing the rap star in litigation stemming from events at the Astroworld Festival in 2021.
Esteban Rodriguez: Leaders of Influence: Minority Attorneys
–Los Angeles Business Journal (2024)
–Law360 (2022)
Product Liability Firm of the Year
–LMG Life Sciences (2022)
“Its lawyers aren’t shy about the limelight. They understand that success in the court of public opinion is an increasingly important part of full-service representation. And they try cases that others might rather avoid.”
–The American Lawyer: Product Liability Litigation Department of the Year
“Drawing upon the expertise of litigators adept at handling private class actions and MDLs, as well as many in the team who leverage former governmental experience to good effect in relation to state investigations and enforcement actions, O’Melveny & Myers LLP is a popular choice for clients in the defense of large-scale mass torts involving multi-pronged plaintiff activity.”
–The Legal 500 US
Steve Brody: Product Liability MVP
–Law360 (2022)
Steve Brody: Product Liability Attorney of the Year
–LMG Life Sciences (2022)
Sabrina Strong: Top 250 Women in Litigation
–Benchmark Litigation (2023)