Rottenstein Law Group Alerted to Pfizer’s Motion to Consolidate 59 Zoloft Birth Defects Cases into One Multidistrict Litigation

(New York, NY, February 1, 2012) The Rottenstein Law Group, which represents clients with claims stemming from birth defects caused by the antidepressant Zoloft, has learned that Pfizer, the manufacturer of Zoloft, has filed a motion with the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) to consolidate for pretrial proceedings a group of cases filed against the company in Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. The stipulations of the motion and some more information on the cases it seeks to consolidate were published in a January 20, 2012 article on the web site, Law.com.
As the article states, all the cases in the group subject to the motion allege that the children of the mothers who took Zoloft during their pregnancies suffered birth defects as a result of using the antidepressant. Pfizer’s motion requests that the MDL consolidation of those cases take place in the Southern District of New York, where Pfizer is headquartered. Since New York has three international airports in its vicinity, Pfizer asserts in its motion, New York would be a convenient location for the cases’ plaintiffs, who are located all over the country.
Pfizer named the Northern District of Mississippi, the Southern District of Mississippi, or the Northern District of Ohio as alternative locations for the proposed MDL, stating that those locations would also be suitable for the cases’ many plaintiffs.
Almost 50 of the cases that are the subject of Pfizer’s MDL motion were removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, according to Law.com. “Pfizer argued in the motion that in the Pennsylvania cases plaintiffs have created an artificial concentration of cases in Pennsylvania by...fraudulently joining Wolters Kluwer Health, a Pennsylvania corporation, as a defendant, in order to defeat diversity jurisdiction,” the article states.
“The plaintiffs’ theory against Wolters Kluwer Health is that it was negligent in the publication of the risks and benefits of using Zoloft during pregnancy in its patient education monographs,” the article continues. “Pfizer argues that the division that published the monographs, Medi-Span, is headquartered in Indiana and has offices in Missouri, so Pennsylvania has no ‘real nexus’ to the out-of-state plaintiffs, defendants that the drug company argues are located elsewhere and the underlying allegedly negligent transactions.”
The Rottenstein Law Group’s  Zoloft Birth Defects Information Center contains social media features that allow for easy sharing on sites like Facebook and Twitter, which enables visitors to spread the word about the potential dangers associated with Zoloft. The firm encourages visitors to link to its sites from their own blogs and Web sites to spread information about dangerous drugs and defective medical devices.
About the Rottenstein Law Group
The Rottenstein Law Group is a New York-based law firm that represents clients in mass tort actions. The firm was founded by Rochelle Rottenstein, a lawyer with over two decades of experience in compassionate representation of clients in consumer product injury, mass tort, and class action law suits. For more information, please visit their Web site, or call (888) 9-ROT-LAW.

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