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The maker of a painkiller seen as one of the chief culprits in the opioid crisis is being accused of causing more than $2 trillion in damages.

Nearly all the states, plus the District of Columbia and territories, made claims against Purdue Pharma totaling $2.156 trillion in connection with the bankruptcy filing the company made last year, according to court documents. The joint filing was made Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York.

Purdue, based in Stamford, Connecticut, is the maker of OxyContin, a long-acting formulation of the opioid painkiller oxycodone. The drug – along with other opioid painkillers marketed by other firms – has been blamed for driving the nationwide opioid crisis that has been going on for more than two decades.

“The opioid epidemic has ravaged this country as a single family has made billions profiting from the destruction it caused,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in an emailed statement. “While [Monday’s] filing may lay out the monetary impact that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family have had on the United States, this financial toll only accounts for a sliver of the damage inflicted on the American people.”

Purdue could not be immediately reached for comment.

Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year in an effort to block more than 2,000 lawsuits from municipal, state and Native American tribal governments. However, state attorneys general at the time balked at the move amid reports that the Sackler family, which owns the drugmaker, had wired about $1 billion to bank accounts located overseas.

The bankruptcy filing was part of a settlement the company proposed, which would also include the Sacklers contributing $3 billion of their own money, while Purdue would put all of its assets into a trust or similar entity established to benefit claimants and the public at large. Meanwhile, a new company would be established that would market Purdue’s products under certain restrictions and contribute doses of medications used to treat opioid addiction and reverse overdose, at low or no cost.

Purdue is one of numerous drugmakers whose products have been implicated in the opioid crisis, a list that also includes firms such as Mallinckrodt and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, as well as the major pharmaceutical distributors and several large retail pharmacy chains.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 15,000 people died from overdoses on prescription opioids in 2018. Starting in the late 1990s, several drug companies began heavily marketing opioid painkillers, assuring physicians that patients would not become addicted to them. But the drugs turned out to in fact be highly addictive, and the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 10.3 million people misused prescription opioids in 2018, while 2 million were seen as having an opioid use disorder.

Photo: Moussa81, Getty Images

When California made the decision to lower its cut score going forward to a “still-higher-than-almost-every-state-but-not-as-high” 1390, most celebrated the move as an effort to both address an ongoing access to justice problem and to improve absolute diversity in a profession that had suffered from protectionist cloistering. And while there was a sideshow about how this was “racist” — it’s not — the California Supreme Court relished an opportunity to pat themselves on the back for a job well done.

Then folks started asking why the new test score didn’t apply to the February exam. If the test is as stable as its proponents claim, then a 1400 six months ago would be just as valid today. For that matter, why not go back a little further? The state maintains that passing scores are valid for five years already.

Faced with these well-reasoned arguments, the California Supreme Court decided to ignore them completely and mumble something about Montana being different. The opinion — which the court delegated to the Clerk to pass along in a letter amounted to a comic dodge from a body that had no appetite to actually engage the papers. It’s not the first time this summer that we’ve seen state courts get lazy when challenged.

But the California legislature may step into this struggle. HR 103, introduced earlier this week by State Assembly member and judiciary committee chair Mark Stone, is a resolution calling upon the state supreme court to adopt retroactivity to 2015. As a resolution, the bill wouldn’t bind the justices to take action, though a legislative outcry can exert some pressure on the institution.

Maybe we can at least get the court to write a real opinion that attempts to respond to the arguments that were raised. It would be, you know, the very least they could do.

Earlier: California Supreme Court Refuses To Apply New Cut Score Retroactively
No Dummies, It’s Not ‘Racist’ To Say Lowering The California Bar Exam Cut Score Will Improve Diversity
California Bar Exam Moves Online… And Finally Lowers Cut Score

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

In the early days of the global pandemic, delaying the bar exam was an obvious step. One that a lot of states refused to take with dangerous consequences, but an obvious step nonetheless. The country was in crisis mode and examinees needed to know that whatever happened, a July bar exam wasn’t something they needed to worry about.

But as we learned more about the nature of the pandemic it became clear that a modest delay wasn’t going to cut it. Some states tried to run the test online and only ended up with further delays. As state bar examiners scramble mostly aimlessly to try and get anything together that resembles the test they’ve staked their jobs upon, examinees are dealing with the fallout of these slapdash efforts.

One consequence of the repeated delays out there that those in positions of authority may not be tracking is the health crisis they’re creating for examinees. Twitter user Emily C. Smith recently shared her story on the platform and while her tale manages to have a relatively positive resolution, it’s impossible to believe that she’s alone in this:

Smith notes that UCLA Law was supportive throughout this ordeal, but that the school is ultimately tied to the greater university. Which is in turn tied to the health insurance contracts it signed. The slow motion tragedy of the American health insurance regime is one of deadlines and a lack of accountability.

It’s a great question. Anyone who defends privatized health insurance based on the “choice” it provides based on a grasp of economics drawn from the back of an Ayn Rand placemat has clearly never dealt with insurance companies. Not even the guy who crafted the idea of health insurance “choice” believes it’s a “choice.” Insurance companies tell you they’ll only cover you on the first and that they’ll drop you on the 23rd and you just have to deal with it. There isn’t much incentive to provide real service because they know you don’t really have a choice but to accept what they give you.

We have officially entered the era of health coverage by social media influencer ranking! Let’s pat ourselves on the back.

Since this story is almost certainly not unique and there are people out there about to take more hits with increased delays and some law firms still pushing off start dates — not to mention the high likelihood that the next round of online exams will also crash — this is apparently the secret to getting your basic human needs covered. So start working on your clever hashtags and start @ing your health insurance providers!

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

The maker of a painkiller seen as one of the chief culprits in the opioid crisis is being accused of causing more than $2 trillion in damages.

Nearly all the states, plus the District of Columbia and territories, made claims against Purdue Pharma totaling $2.156 trillion in connection with the bankruptcy filing the company made last year, according to court documents. The joint filing was made Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York.

Purdue, based in Stamford, Connecticut, is the maker of OxyContin, a long-acting formulation of the opioid painkiller oxycodone. The drug – along with other opioid painkillers marketed by other firms – has been blamed for driving the nationwide opioid crisis that has been going on for more than two decades.

“The opioid epidemic has ravaged this country as a single family has made billions profiting from the destruction it caused,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in an emailed statement. “While [Monday’s] filing may lay out the monetary impact that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family have had on the United States, this financial toll only accounts for a sliver of the damage inflicted on the American people.”

Purdue could not be immediately reached for comment.

Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year in an effort to block more than 2,000 lawsuits from municipal, state and Native American tribal governments. However, state attorneys general at the time balked at the move amid reports that the Sackler family, which owns the drugmaker, had wired about $1 billion to bank accounts located overseas.

The bankruptcy filing was part of a settlement the company proposed, which would also include the Sacklers contributing $3 billion of their own money, while Purdue would put all of its assets into a trust or similar entity established to benefit claimants and the public at large. Meanwhile, a new company would be established that would market Purdue’s products under certain restrictions and contribute doses of medications used to treat opioid addiction and reverse overdose, at low or no cost.

Purdue is one of numerous drugmakers whose products have been implicated in the opioid crisis, a list that also includes firms such as Mallinckrodt and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, as well as the major pharmaceutical distributors and several large retail pharmacy chains.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 15,000 people died from overdoses on prescription opioids in 2018. Starting in the late 1990s, several drug companies began heavily marketing opioid painkillers, assuring physicians that patients would not become addicted to them. But the drugs turned out to in fact be highly addictive, and the Department of Health and Human Services estimates that 10.3 million people misused prescription opioids in 2018, while 2 million were seen as having an opioid use disorder.

Photo: Moussa81, Getty Images

COVID-19 has thrown the legal profession into upheaval, but for some firms, the time has come to readjust and reassess the austerity measures that were put into place to prepare for the economic downturn. We’ve already reported on several firms that have announced partial and complete rollbacks on their salary cuts, but we now yet another Biglaw firm is reversing course, and almost everyone at the firm is sure to be thrilled.

Since March, Reed Smith — which raked in $1,246,926,000 in 2019 gross revenue, making it 26th on the Am Law 100 ranking — has announced not one, not two, not three, but FOUR rounds of salary reductions for partners, associates, and staff. First, the firm announced that partner cash distributions would be slowed as a “precaution” to “brac[e] for the short-term and potential long-term economic impacts of COVID-19. A short time later, in mid April, the firm came for associate salaries, announcing 15 percent cuts that would last from May through the end of August. About two weeks later, the firm announced that partner bonuses were being deferred and split into separate payments (and the same would happen for staff discretionary bonuses). Then, on June 1, the firm announced that its salary cuts for associates would not only last through the end of the year, but they’d increase to 20 percent. On top of that, staff earning more than $100,000 would take a 10 percent salary hit while other professionals would see reduced workweeks, reduced salaries, and furloughs.

Earlier this week, Sandy Thomas, Reed Smith’s global managing partner, announced that June’s salary cuts, which were originally supposed to last through the end of 2020, would be reduced for some — but not all — those affected, starting in September and lasting through the end of the year. From the American Lawyer:

According to his statement, a current 20% compensation cut for fixed-share partners will be reduced to 15% on September 1. For counsel, a current 20% compensation reduction will be reduced to 15% on the same day.

For associates, a current 15% compensation cut will remain at that level. (Previously, the firm planned a 20% cut for September 1, Thomas’s statement said.)

For professional staff earning more than $100,000, a current 10% cut will become a 5% cut.

Everyone gets a break — except for associates, whose reward is that they won’t be forced to endure even bigger pay cuts for the rest of the year. See, we said almost everyone would be thrilled. “Reed Smith has kept its focus on what is most important as we manage through this extraordinary pandemic: protecting the safety and well-being of our people and supporting our clients,” Thomas said. Sorry, associates. This doesn’t seem fair, but always remember: it could be much worse.

Let’s hope more firms are able to roll back COVID-19 austerity measures — and soon.

If your firm or organization is slashing salaries, closing its doors, or reducing the ranks of its lawyers or staff, whether through open layoffs, stealth layoffs, or voluntary buyouts, please don’t hesitate to let us know. Our vast network of tipsters is part of what makes Above the Law thrive. You can email us or text us (646-820-8477).

Reed Smith Partially Walks Back Pay Cuts for Lawyers, Staff [American Lawyer]

Earlier: Biglaw Firm Cuts Back Partner Compensation Amid COVID-19 Economic Upheaval
Billion-Dollar Biglaw Firm Cutting Associate Salaries
Reed Smith Partners Taking Another COVID-19 Financial Hit
Biglaw Firm Announces Even Deeper Austerity Cuts

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Everybody get your surprised faces ready, because today, I’d like to tell you about how ICE is manipulating its statistics on COVID-19 in the immigration jails, and endangering a lot of people’s lives in the process. (And by jail, I meant “civil detention of people who have mostly not been accused of any crime.” Oopsies!)

If you look at the detainee statistics DHS offers publicly on COVID-19, you will see a very high success rate for avoiding COVID-19 cases. Their website says that, as of August 14, they have had a total of five deaths and 4,721 confirmed cases in custody, out of a detained population of 21,402. That’s remarkably good for an institutional setting, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the risk is high — people frequently move in and out and there are limited opportunities to socially distance or practice good hygiene.

As it turns out, these remarkable numbers were not achieved through tender care of the vulnerable people in ICE custody, but through blatant manipulation of the statistics. A recent PBS Frontline piece on this lays out how ICE keeps its COVID-19 death numbers so low: It waits until people are very sick and then discharges them from custody. If they die, or manage not to die but rack up huge hospital bills, or can’t find anyone willing to house them because they’re sick, too bad. What’s more important here: human life, or making Trump immigration policy look good?

The COVID-19 testing numbers ICE reports on its website are even more impressive than their reported death rate. In fact, as of August 14, the website says they’ve tested roughly 2,500 more detainees than they had in custody. This could be the result of testing certain people more than once, or possibly the testing number is cumulative. I don’t know. What I do know is that at least three federal courts have had to order ICE to do the widespread COVID-19 testing that it claims it’s already doing.

Last Sunday evening, in fact, a Northern California district court made an emergency order requiring ICE to test everyone detained or working at ICE’s Mesa Verde Processing Facility. Judge Vince Chhabria said ICE and its private prison contractor, the GEO Group, showed “deliberate indifference” to the pandemic by refusing to test staff or detainees. In another case the ACLU brought in Maryland, a federal judge found that an ICE official’s statement, made under penalty of perjury, that there were zero cases in a certain jail was “demonstrably false.”

And earlier this month, the ACLU of Southern California discovered that ICE has refused let to GEO jailers at the Adelanto Processing Center actually use the 1,900 test kits they received via overnight courier back in May. As a result, exactly one of the 305 detainees who had symptoms between March 1 and July 15 was tested. A federal court actually ordered Adelanto to follow CDC guidelines for prisons back in April, and the ACLU has asked it to enforce that order.

As a result of all this “deliberate indifference,” the cross-border immigrant advocacy group Al Otro Lado has started asking for volunteer lawyers to draw up estate plans for detainees, to make sure detainees’ minor children are cared for if they die in detention. It would be great if this post got a few more volunteers for them, but it would be even better if this country treated immigrants like human beings.

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Lorelei Laird is a freelance writer specializing in the law, and the only person you know who still has an “I Believe Anita Hill” bumper sticker. Find her at wordofthelaird.com.

Long before anyone had heard of Martin Shkreli, in those blissful and half-remembered years before 2016, an Israeli pharmaceutical company had his idea: Why don’t we increase the price of this drug for multiple sclerosis patients from $17,000 a year to $73,000 for the last nine years we’ll have a patent on it? That’ll make it almost as profitable as pushing opioids.

Lacking, however, Shkreli’s taste for bad press, and possessed of an institutional infrastructure enjoyed by actual pharma companies but not Pharma Bros, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries had an idea to avoid telegenic, wheelchair-bound patients from getting a bill four times as high, or a letter from Medicare saying it would no longer cover such an outrageously-priced drug, calling their congresspeople and local news anchors. It would just pay the difference itself for Medicare patients, through a couple of intermediary charities, ensuring that people kept using the drug and that other people would pay new inflated price for it.

* New Jersey’s governor said “bring it on” in response to a lawsuit filed by the Trump Campaign against the state’s mail-in-voting plan. Have a good idea for how the Trump Campaign can respond… [Politico]

* The practicalities associated with COVID-19 are leading to some interesting trials. [ABA Journal]

* A residents’ group on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is lawyering up to take action against homelessness in the area that has increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. [New York Post]

* The Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case seeking to overturn the Affordable Care Act one week after the November election. [Hill]

* An attorney has sued his former law firm for allegedly jilting him out of a fee split for a lucrative client the attorney brought to the firm. [Texas Lawyer]

* A lawsuit in Alabama will determine if curbside voting will be allowed during the next election. If you can be sworn into the bar curbside, it seems like voting curbside should be no problem. [AL.com]

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Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothmanlawyer.com.

HARARE (Reuters) – Zimbabwe’s government on Wednesday said it had sought a meeting with the Vatican representative to understand whether Catholic bishops who accused it of human rights abuses and cracking down on critics were speaking on behalf of the Holy See.

Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi described a pastoral letter written by the Zimbabwe Catholic Bishops Conference last weekend as “inappropriately prescriptive and grossly disrespectful”.

The bishops’ strongly worded letter said the country had a multi-layered crisis, including economic collapse, deepening poverty, corruption and human rights abuses.

Inflation running at more than 800% is the clearest sign of the worst economic crisis in over a decade and has evoked memories of hyperinflation under former president Robert Mugabe, whose 37-year rule was ended by an army coup in 2017.

Ziyambi said Harare authorities took offence to the bishop’s description of the government, headed by Mugabe’s replacement, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, as lacking the knowledge, skill or emotional stability to resolve Zimbabwe’s political and economic problems.

“The statement constitutes an outright insult on the person of President E.D. Mnangagwa and his entire government, and is couched in language decidedly unbecoming of an institution such as the Catholic Church,” said Ziyambi.

“Government is compelled to engage the Vatican in order to ascertain whether or not such statements reflect the official attitude of the Holy See towards Zimbabwe’s leadership or whether these are merely the views of the various individuals concerned.”

Foreign Minister Sibusiso Moyo would meet the local Vatican representative, said Ziyambi.

Ziyambi denied there was a political crisis in Zimbabwe and said it was all social media hype.

But critics say several activists have been arrested, abducted or tortured for speaking against the government and accuse Mnangagwa of using the COVID-19 pandemic to stifle dissent.

Post published in: Featured

The country had had 141 deaths from covid-19 and 5378 recorded cases as of 20 August, nearly five months after the first fatality ‪on 23 March. The people infected include 480 health workers, said the Ministry of Health.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬1‬‬

At 14%, the weekly percentage increase in infections in Zimbabwe from 5 to 11 August is also much lower than ‬that of its neighbours. Botswana saw an increase of 33%, Namibia 31%, Zambia 26%, and Mozambique 22% in the same week, figures from the World Health Organization showed.2

Chiratidzo Ndhlovu, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Zimbabwe, believes that the country’s early imposition of lockdown may have helped avoid an initial surge in cases. “We didn’t have a lot of flights coming into the country. I think that may have protected us,” she said.

Serological testing capacity currently stands at 1000 to 1500 tests a day, up from just 25 tests on 10 April. But there are concerns in the medical community that testing is happening mostly in urban populations and that it may not capture current infection levels.

“There are several rapid response teams who do testing across the country, and those are the ones that get reported,” said Rashida Ferrand, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, currently seconded to head up the covid-19 unit at Parirenyatwa Hospital in Harare. “But that doesn’t tell you about the cases that are out in the community that don’t get tested, or die and never make it to care. The cases reported in the national statistics are definitely a complete underestimate, as are the deaths.”

Post published in: Featured