Joe Hollingsworth and Eric Lasker cited by 6th Circuit in Reversal of Plaintiff Verdict in Welding Fume Litigation
news | September 8, 2010
In September 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed a $20.5 million jury verdict in favor of a plaintiff in the welding fume litigation, holding that the district court had abused its discretion in admitting the expert testimony of plaintiff’s physician that the defendants’ products triggered “manganese-induced parkinsonism.”
In holding that the district court erred under Daubert in accepting the plaintiffs’ expert’s differential diagnosis, the court cited to Joe Hollingsworth’s and Eric Lasker’s The Case Against Differential Diagnosis: Daubert, Medical Causation Testimony, and the Scientific Method, 37 J. Health L. 85, 98 (2004). As Messrs. Hollingsworth and Lasker explained in their article, the court held that the “low [do-no-harm] threshold for making a [differential diagnosis] decision serves well in the clinic but not in the courtroom, where decision requires not just an educated hunch but at least a preponderance of the evidence.”