As noted earlier here, the occasional bad day that Merck experienced recently in regard to a couple of its Vioxx cases is inevitable when defending tens of thousands of such cases.
However, it’s also inevitable that Merck will experience some good days during the Vioxx trial marathon. One of those occurred yesterday as the federal judge in the recent New Orleans trial that concluded with a $51 million jury verdict against Merck threw out the verdict on the basis that the jury’s award was clearly excessive.
Meanwhile, according to this Heather Won Tesoriero/WSJ ($) article, a juror involved in awarding a plaintiff a $32 million verdict against Merck in a Vioxx trial that took place earlier this year in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley had borrowed money from the plaintiff prior to the trial, a small detail that the juror did not disclose during pre-trial questioning. As noted in this prior post, the Rio Grande Valley was rated by the American Tort Reform Association as the number one “judicial hell-hole” for 2005. The ATRA describes a judicial hell-hole as a venue of “disproportionately harmful impact on civil litigation. Litigation tourists, guided by their personal injury lawyers, seek out these places because they know they will produce a positive outcome – an excessive verdict or settlement, a favorable precedent, or both.”
Looks to me as if Merck needs to compare notes with Ford Motor Company over this one.

One of the biggest deterrents to free-market investment in state-controlled economies such as China or Russia is consistent application of the rule of law, and few rules of law are more important to an investment decision than those that bear on the risk of insolvency. So, the news that a long-awaited amendment to China’s bankruptcy laws was approved by a powerful government committee and is scheduled to go into effect on June 1, 2007 is an important milestone in the Chinese government’s continuing — but sometimes ineffectual — attempts to attract greater foreign investment capital in China’s economy. A key provision in the new law introduces a mechanism for corporate reorganizations, something that has been alien to the Chinese Communist legal system, but a concept that has preserved massive amounts of employment and going concern value in the U.S. and other Western market-based legal systems.
Investment of foreign capital in China has traditionally been high risk, but the new bankruptcy law reflects that the Chinese government is serious about passing reforms that addresses that risk. Compare that to Russia, where investors still face daunting risk in an economy controlled by a volatile combination of government officials and oligarchs.
By the way, I hope the amendment to the Chinese bankruptcy law corrects this type of problem that arose under the old law. In the meantime, the Chinese government is also attempting to reform the market for funeral attendees in that country.