Trial War Stories - Opioid Crisis with Peter Weinberger

How do you stop a nationwide epidemic through litigation?

In this episode of Trial War Stories, Andy Goldwasser sits down with legendary trial lawyer Peter Weinberger to break down one of the most complex and impactful cases in American legal history—the opioid multidistrict litigation.

This wasn’t just another case. It was a battle against a public health crisis that devastated communities across the country. Representing thousands of cities and counties, Peter and his team took on pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies to hold them accountable for their role in fueling the opioid epidemic.

Inside this episode, you’ll learn:
• How the opioid MDL was built and why municipalities—not individuals—were the key plaintiffs 
• The legal strategy behind proving public nuisance at a national scale 
• How data (including DEA pill tracking) became a game-changing weapon at trial 
• What it takes to litigate a $24 BILLION case with over 50 million documents 
• The real role of trial lawyers in stepping in when regulatory systems fail 
• Behind-the-scenes insights from the bellwether trial against CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart 

This is more than a case—it’s a masterclass in mass tort litigation, trial strategy, and using the courtroom to create societal change.

If you’re a young lawyer looking to sharpen your trial skills, or a seasoned litigator wanting insight into high-stakes litigation, this episode delivers lessons you won’t find in any textbook.

Visit: https://www.c-g-law.com/

00:00:00 – Introduction: How Do You Stop an Epidemic?
00:02:00 – What Is the Opioid MDL and Why It Matters
00:05:00 – Understanding Multidistrict Litigation (MDL)
00:08:00 – Why Municipalities Led the Fight
00:10:00 – The Origins of the Opioid Crisis (Purdue & OxyContin)
00:13:00 – Legal Theory: Public Nuisance & Controlled Substances Act
00:17:00 – The Lawyer’s Role in Fixing Systemic Failures
00:18:30 – Inside the First Trial Against Pharmacies
00:23:00 – Trial Preparation: Millions of Documents & Strategy
00:27:00 – Jury Strategy, Voir Dire & Shadow Juries

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

How do you stop an epidemic? Today you're going to find out from one of the great lawyers that actually did it. Every trial lawyer has that one case. The one that pushed them to the edge, changed how they practiced, or kept them up at night. This is Trial War Stories. And I'm your host, Andy Goldwasser. I sit down with great trial lawyers to unpack unforgettable cases, the strategy, the chaos, the pressure, and the moment to turn the tide beyond the transcripts and verdicts. And now to the show. I am so excited to have as my guest today Peter Weinberger. Peter, thank you for joining. Peter is just an absolutely incredible lawyer. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Thank you. Great being with you, Andy.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

It's great to have you. And I was saying to our producer and Quenna this morning that this is one of those episodes that I think may be the most exciting episode for me to talk about. Because we are always talking about these single events, which is what we as lawyers mostly do, right? We represent a single client in connection with a single matter. What we're going to be talking about today is the opioid trial, which was the largest case in Ohio history and one of the nation's most complex cases ever that affected just thousands of thousands of people. There were thousands of so-called clients in the case, and it was just such an important case. So, Peter, can you share with us a little bit about how you got involved in this litigation and what it's about?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Sure. Andy, as you know, our firm, uh, and that includes me, have been involved in, you know, handling medical malpractice and product liability and catastrophic injury cases. And, you know, dating back to Craig Spangenberg, we actually started handling what we call mass tort cases uh in the with the phylidomide children. Um and, you know, that that's back when I was in law school back 50 years ago. And uh so over the years, we've been involved in a lot of mass torts. And I was involved in one uh before Judge Polster that involved the dye that you use for MRIs, gadolinium-based contrast agents that caused severe injuries to people with um end-stage renal disease. And so he had a mass tort case that was assigned that case by the the uh federal panel that assigns uh these cases to be consolidated before one judge. We finished that case about uh 12 or 13 years ago. And back in 2017, just as I was slowing down and uh and gave up the reins as managing partner, I got a call from a bunch of lawyers around the country saying it looked like Judge Polster was going to be handling the multidistrict uh case involving the opioid epidemic. And they knew that I had uh had a connection with the court involved in that other case, and they asked me if I would be, quote unquote, one of the leaders, and specifically the liaison council. So the liaison council is the person that sort of helps organize the plaintiff's lawyers, corresponds and communicates with the defense lawyers, and most importantly, communicates with the court on status conferences with respect to status conferences and discovery disputes. And so, sure enough, in early of 2018, uh we uh 21 firms organized their cases that they had filed on behalf of cities and counties around the country, about 3,000 of them, and they got consolidated before Judge Polster. I became the liaison counsel and one of the co-leads uh in the case, and things proceeded from there. Uh I told my wife, by the way, I told my wife this was gonna last three years, no more, and here we are in our eighth year going into our ninth year.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Uh uh, of course, but you've done such great work, it's worth it. So I I I just want to explain for our listeners who might not understand what we call the MDL or the multi-district litigation process. When there is a case involving a mass injury or mass event that causes a lot of harm, it doesn't make sense to have hundreds or thousands of cases filed all over the country where the same defen against the same defendant, where the same people would have to have their deposition taken a thousand times, or the same documents would have to be produced a thousand times. So there's a process where these cases can be consolidated before one judge in a uniform way to handle as a consolidated proceeding. Did I explain that correctly, the multidistrict litigation process?

SPEAKER_01 5:18

Yes, and some people confuse it with a class action. It's not a class action, it's individual cases. Umsu individual cases with individual injuries, particularly in the personal injury field, um, they don't lend themselves to class action cases. Uh they have to be filed on an individual basis. In this case, we weren't talking about individuals, we were talking about cities and counties who sustained severe economic losses dealing with um the opioid epidemic. Now, um the indirect effect of that, or really the direct effect, is to help people, uh, to provide for uh a remedy so that there would be addiction treatment centers, that there would be uh foster homes that would take care of the kids of parents who were addicted, that would help the judicial system, who had drug courts, um, and would help uh emergency uh medical services, to have Narcan, to um uh be able to treat people with overdoses. So that's that's the kind of case that was brought around the country that got consolidated before Judge Polstra.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Yeah, and it's and it and I think when most people hear for the first time, oh, the opioid litigation, I think they automatically think, well, it must be for people who were actually injured by an opioid pill or killed or something to that effect. But here, that's not who you and the other lawyers were representing. You were representing municipalities, cities, and counties. Why is that, Peter?

SPEAKER_01 7:05

So as a firm, we looked at individual injury and death cases involving opioid overdoses. And the problem that we had was in tracing what was the cause. So a person might take an oxycontin pill prescribed by a doctor and ultimately become addicted, but the addiction doesn't necessarily, or the death doesn't necessarily occur because of the prescription opioids, but the person transitions from, you know, uh prescription opioids to street drugs, uh, has lots of other problems, perhaps, uses heroin, uses cocaine, uh, uses street fentanyl, and ultimately dies or suffers severe addiction. So the problem of causation in the individual case is enormous. We, on the other hand, took this sort of aggregated approach. So we were able to look at data of prescription um dispensing across the country, and we were able to prove not only general causation, but specific causation in terms of the conduct of the defendants uh and their failures and their causing the public nuisance. And so that was the best way we could figure out on how to provide a remedy that ultimately benefited the, you know, uh citizens of our country.

SPEAKER_00 8:41

And that's and that's really the key here. I mean, you when you go, when you went to the court in a case like this, you had to come to realize that really the cause of these deaths and these injuries was from the massive amount of opioids that were being distributed across the country and dispensed from different pharmacies or prescribed by different doctors or these pill mills and those kinds of things. So, how do you use the court and the judiciary to make a difference, right? It's not by handling these single event cases, it's really bringing the claims on behalf of the municipalities to try to bring change. And I think that's ultimately what you and your team were so successful in doing. But let me take a step back for a moment. Can you tell us about, and I know it's massive litigation, but can you do your best just to tell us about the case, what your theories were, why that you had those theories, and how the case progressed?

SPEAKER_01 9:46

Sure. Uh so it started with the Purdue story, which pretty much everybody knows about because there have been movies and books written about the Sacklers in Purdue. So they came up with this drug called Oxycontin uh in the mid-1990s to replace morphine MS cotton, because MS cotton had uh, you know, the the was known to be highly addictive. It contained morphine. Uh as it turns out, this molecule, oxycodone, uh, comes from the same opioid plant, and it's manipulated to act just like morphine uh in terms of treating pain. But it is highly addictive, it affects the part of the brain that um the pleasure center, and it latches onto it, and the addiction that's caused from that is actually worse than morphine. It's two and a half times the strength of morphine. So they came up with this idea of marketing through sales reps to doctors, and they used uh fraudulent literature claiming that because they had developed this continuous release pill known as oxycontin, that they could keep the blood level um uniform throughout the day, and that somehow that would prevent addiction. And they sold the doctors on this, they duped the doctors. It was actually a book about how the doctors were duped, um, written by one of our experts who was an addiction expert from Stanford. They duped the government, they duped the FDA, uh, and these claims that were not scientifically based, that this was not addictive, was absolutely false. Ultimately, Purdue uh was convicted in 2007 and 208, and then again in 2018 they went into bankruptcy, and that's a whole nother story. Uh they were a privately held corporation. The Sacklers took out about 15 to 16 billion dollars as a family out of the corporation just from OxyContin. Uh, but they needed they needed the district the distributors. There's three main distributors, McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Amerisource Bergen. And they needed the pharmacies to be on board. Now, the distributors and the pharmacies have an obligation under the Controlled Substances Act to ensure that there are effective controls over uh drugs like oxycontin and other opioids. They have a duty to make sure that if there are suspicious orders or if there are red flags associated with a particular script prescription, that they monitor it and they stop the distribution and they stop the dispensing. So the bottom line is we use the Controlled Substances Act as our claim, as our rules of conduct, in order to then prove the public nuisance claim case, which is very simply when a defendant intentionally or unlawfully creates a danger to the community or affects the safety of the community residents, they are liable for that public nuisance. And in this case, they were they were held liable in various cases and in our trial, uh particularly the pharmacies, for creating the public nuisance uh which was the opioid epidemic.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

So I have a number of questions that I want to ask you. My first question is if there's this Controlled Substance Act and it's up to really the government to supervise the distribution and the dispensing of this medication, why didn't the DEA or some other organization come in and stop the problem?

SPEAKER_01 14:04

So the DEA, uh, like a lot of federal agencies, including the FDA, have limited resources. And the fact is, Andy, in uh in 2007, Joe Rannazisi, who is the head of diversion control, uh, and was the whistleblower in this case and was uh the 60-minute whistleblower uh and was one of our experts. He he uh wrote a letter, several letters, to every registrant uh under the Controlled Substances Act, the manufacturers, the distributors, and the just and the dispensers, and said, look, as of 2007, we have a huge problem. We have a growing epidemic, and you have responsibilities under the Controlled Substances Act to look for suspicious orders by pharmacies, uh, that is to say, the distributors and manufacturers. And as at the pharmacy level, you have a duty to look for red flags, and you have to set up systems to do that. And we're gonna monitor those systems, and we're gonna monitor the suspicious orders. Well, uh, that worked for about a month or two, but there was so much money being made in the in the distribution and dispensing of opioids because they had because these defendants had changed the whole paradigm of treating pain. That, you know, the the the uh the the pain levels that that are measured in hospitals, you know, from one to ten, that started with Purdue. That started with Purdue going to the hospital uh uh associations and uh and saying we may we need to make this our fifth vital sign. And nobody should be discharged from the hospital with a level of pain above five. And if you took if you get discharged, the government would actually, you know, with a with a pain level higher than that, they would actually uh it would actually affect the reimbursement. So um, you know, it was a huge problem created by big pharma. Um and and so our our job, Andy, getting back to the case, sorry for being on my soapbox.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

No, it's important, it's really important information.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Our job was to do to use the judicial system what the other two branches of government were incapable of doing, that is to provide a remedy to our society uh for the what had happened in terms of the creation of this epidemic. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

And that's just such an amazing part that I don't think most people appreciate about lawyers, especially in this mass tort world, because they see all this advertising and they think that the lawyers are chasing down these cases. Here, you're you're doing something, you, your team, and the group of lawyers who are taking just tremendous risk to pursue this litigation, you're doing it to fix an epidemic because the other parts of our government have failed to do so. And and it takes a really brave group of lawyers to do that. Peter, let's turn to the case itself. So I want the this podcast is about trials. So I know that you were liaison counsel in the case, one of the co-leads. You were also code lead trial counsel. Can you tell us about the the fur that first trial involving opioid litigation?

SPEAKER_01 17:47

So uh in 2021, November of 2021, we um tried the case involving the CVS Walgreens in Walmart. It was a bellwether case involving Lake and Trumbull counties. It was selected in a selection process with the defendants. By that time we had settled with the distributors and with the manufacturers. We actually started a distributor trial in November of 2019, Mark and Mark Lanier and I. That got settled at the courthouse door after jury selection, and then we ended up in a global settlement with the distributors and with uh JJ, that was uh about uh $24 billion distributed across the country. Incredible. But the pharmacies decided that they wanted to go to trial, and so we started trial uh in November of 2021, Mark Lanier and I, against CVS Walgreens and Walmarts.

SPEAKER_00 18:53

Hey Peter, I have to stop you for a second. So your clients in that bellwether case, just the bellwether case, which is the first one that you're trying, is are Lake and Trumbull counties? Are those your clients? And the defendants are who?

SPEAKER_01 19:07

CVS, Walgreens, and Walmarts. The big three. The big three. Okay. Uh CVS and Walgreens. Uh we were able to, by the way, um backtracking for just a second. Every pill, every pill is recorded in what's called the Arcos data of the DEA. So every time a manufacturer manufactures a pill, they have to report that to the DEA. Every time the distributor receives a pill, they have to report it to the DEA. Every time a pharmacy receives a pill from a distributor, they have to report it to the DEA. And so we have this huge database so that we can tell in Lake and Trumbull counties, for example, how many pills were distributed and dispensed every day of every month of every year between 2006 and 2014.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

Incredible.

SPEAKER_01 20:17

You know, what was the responsibility in terms of creating the prescription opioid market in Lake and Trumbull County? And we could actually compute on a per capita basis how many pills per capita were dispensed within the county. So we use that to prove, you know, you talked earlier about the increasing volume of pills causing the epidemic. We know that with respect to opioids and other controlled substances, the higher the volume, the more likely it is that the pills are getting diverted into the hands of people who for which it was not properly prescribed. We know that it's that it causes diversion because of bad doctors who shouldn't be prescribing it in the first place. And so that data, that aggregate data that we use was really important to prove the case. So Lake and Trumbull were the were the test cases. They both have populations of about 200,000 people each. Uh, the per capita opioid pills over those eight years was about 40 to 50 oxycontin pills per year, per capita, for every man, woman, and child within the county.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

That is astounding. I mean, you talk about an epidemic. That what you just described proves that there's a problem.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

So so tell us about the trial. How did it, how did it come together? What was it about? What was your role? Tell us about it.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Sure. Well, I had the honor of trying the case with the person that uh, with all def due respect to the lawyers that you've interviewed already and to my own partners and who I'm in a great law firm. But I consider Mark Lanier, you know, one of the top, if not the best trial lawyer in the country. And uh he had uh he was one of the 21 firms that uh gathered together in this multidistrict litigation. And so I met Mark about seven or eight years ago. I of course had heard about him. Uh he and I developed a fantastic relationship. And so we just the group of lawyers that were involved in the case decided that he and I should try the case together. So um, you know, he was clearly the lead. Um I did a lot of the witnesses, I did most of the workup of the case. Mark came in at the last minute to try the case. And so we we tried this case in federal court. So remember, you've got a unanimous jury required. We had uh 16 jurors, we needed a unanimous of 12. Um we uh we spent we've spent in the case a total, this is across all defendants, about 150 million dollars for litigation costs.

SPEAKER_00 23:21

Just for that particular case?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Well, for the whole for all the cases, in this particular case, we spent uh about $10 million to bring it to trial. Litigation costs, expense uh expert costs, etc.

SPEAKER_00 23:36

And these are expenses that that the county and cities aren't paying for, the clients aren't paying for them, the lawyers are paying these expenses.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

There's no way that Lake and Trumbull County could have afforded to pay the litigation expenses in this case. They were strapped, trying to, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul from one department to another to deal with the epidemic.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

So the only way this could be get done is with lawyers who had the courage to invest not only their own money, but their time to make a difference. Otherwise, it's never nothing, there's not going to be a change.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Right. So we've we to get ready for this trial, we reviewed over 50 million documents. Uh, our team put in more than three million hours of time in the case.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Incredible.

SPEAKER_01 24:26

Uh we so we synthesized it all into you know basically a single double plaintiff bellwether trial. Um, we did community surveys using jury consultants to figure out what how do people feel about their pharmacy. Most people don't realize that pharmacists have what's called a corresponding responsibility to make sure that they're dispensing drugs for a proper medical reason. That corresponding responsibility is uh lies with them as well as the doctors. So they have to set up systems and use their own data to figure out whether there are red flags and that that certain people and certain doctors shouldn't be either um prescribing or utilizing opioids. Um so we did that community survey, we figured out you know what was the what was the demographics of the type of juror that we wanted. Uh there were 3,000 questionnaires sent out to prospective jurors. Uh it was whittled down to about 150 prior to trial. Uh we ultimately uh voirdeered about 100 jurors. Judge Polster took a very active role in voardier. We voardeered each juror individually in chambers because you can might imagine questions about addiction in the family and how they feel about pharma and how they feel about you know the epidemic, uh, uh how they feel about um treating addicts and that sort of thing are all questions that were really you know um important to uh to ask these these prospective jurors.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Were the lawyers allowed to ask questions?

SPEAKER_01 26:21

The lawyers were allowed to ask questions. What was kind of unique about the case is that I was the only local lawyer that was involved in the Bordeaux. Um Jones Day represented Walmart. Uh a firm from Washington, D.C. represented CVS. Uh uh, and um Bartlett Beck from Chicago represented uh Walgreens. And uh and I was the only local lawyer. Uh so I I had uh you know, with obviously with jury consultants, I had uh what I would say is a pretty distinct advantage jury voardier. I handled the entire voidier for our side. And uh so we ended up with a juror of uh a jury of 16 uh people from around um the region. As you know, in federal court, you you draw jurors from six or seven counties, not just Chihog County, and we proceeded in a trial. And uh we tried the case for seven weeks, and uh we employed a shadow jury. So that's a that's a linear um that's that's something that Mark does in all the big cases. So we had a jury consultant who um who went out and solicited potential jurors. We tried to figure out a demographic for the the shadow jury that mirrored the jury that we had as best as we could. And there uh because this was such a prominent case, they um it was broadcast into another courtroom, and so uh there were visitors that that were allowed to be in our courtroom as well as another courtroom, and our shadow jury was in the other courtroom. Incredible. The jury consultant would debrief them every night, and then when Mark and I would go back to his hotel room, by about eight o'clock at night, we had all the information as to how we did that day.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

This is incredible. I I gotta take a step back, Peter, because you you start with before juries even thought about you do this big data survey. You then go through this really intense process of jury selection. Do you have your your consultant with you in chambers during this jury selection process?

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Yes. Uh we used three jury consultants. We use Marx, uh, he wasn't in the in chambers with us. We use Lisa Blue, you know, very nationally prominent uh jury consultant, consultant from Texas. And we used uh a guy who I've been working with for 30 years that it turns out was had worked with Mark Lanier for at least that long, and Robert Hirschhorn. And uh he was in chambers with us. Uh he's a great friend. He's he's a premier jury consultant, and yeah, so we he was with us.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Incredible. So then you used a consultant for the jury selection process, and now you actually have a shadow jury to mirror your the actual jury so that at the end of the day, the jury consultant could gather data from this shadow jury, provide that data to you and Mark so that you could use that information to help guide and theme your case each and every day moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

That's right. And um we had uh an additional advantage, and that is the judge allowed jury questions. Now it's a little bit different than you what you might have experienced. Usually the questions are gathered up uh at the end of uh cross-examination, and then the judge asks the questions. In this particular case, the judge, the the lawyers would gather up the questions from the bailiff. We would confer for a short period of time, uh, and then whoever put on the direct of that witness had to go through the questions and provide the answers uh as best as the the direct examiner could, or have the have the witness obviously answer the question, or or the cross-examiner who uh could could then also cross-examine the witness based upon the questions. We during the course of this trial, we had a very, you know, this jury understood the importance of this case and its you know, likely national prominence. And I think all told we had about 250 written questions that were answered during the course of this seven-week trial. What'd we find out? Our themes were resonating. They were asking questions that I wish I would have asked the particular witness. And uh so we knew between our shadow jury and between the questions that were being asked, that we were doing pretty well during the course of uh our case in chief, and things got even better during the defendant's case. And then I just want to add one other thing. Um, you you talk about jury service and the importance of uh juries in our system. This jury spent seven weeks with us during COVID. This is November of 2021, okay, wearing masks. By the way, try trying a case with a jury that has a mask on, that has masks on.

SPEAKER_00 32:22

Yeah, really.

SPEAKER_01 32:25

You couldn't tell their expressions. But anyway, uh, seven weeks in trial, they deliberated just on liability. This was just a liability-only case, and we'll talk about that in a second, for six days.

SPEAKER_00 32:42

It's incredible. They they really took their job seriously.

SPEAKER_01 32:47

That's all you can ask for from a so how did they do that? When when we debriefed them, well, one of the one of the jurors was a uh a school teacher, a social studies teacher from Sharin Falls. She was also a track coach, by the way. And uh what we found out is that she used she she um supervised the deliberations as if she was in class. So she had these big sheets of paper, she would um write down uh all the questions that had to be answered on these big sheets of paper uh and attach them to the wall, and then she would go through all they she had the jury go through all the elements with respect to each of the three defendants individually. And that's what took seven days.

SPEAKER_00 33:44

Incredible, though. That I mean that's that's really what you want from a juror. Yes. Amazing. You Peter, you touched on uh the the jury what seemed to be resonating to your themes throughout the case. So what were your themes and how did you develop those themes?

SPEAKER_01 34:04

So the the the the big thing was foreseeability, Andy. Um in other words, uh if you don't have controls over opioids, is the harm to the community likely to occur? And if you know that the epidemic is heating up, and you know that you have to control it by controlling volume, how do you do that? And do you have the wherewithal to do that? So the so the defendants weren't surprised by what was happening because it was all over the newspaper starting in 2001. The question was, what were they doing about it? And they basically lent a blind eye to the whole thing because there was so much money being made. And this is a perfect, you know, this is a perfect example of what's wrong with our pharmaceutical industry, that it's a not-for-profit, I mean, that it is a for-profit industry as opposed to not-for-profit. And so they basically ignored their obligations. And what they try to say in trial was, well, you know, as as things were getting bad, we tried to put new systems in place. We started to look at our data, we tried to educate our pharmacists better, but it took time. We had to spend money on it. We had it, it was part of our budget, uh, and we couldn't get enough money, et cetera. And so don't hold us responsible. It's all the bad doctors and the bad patients that should be held responsible for that. Well, we had an engineer from Swagelock on the jury. And when we debriefed him and we asked, you know, what resonated with you, he said, Well, look, he said, I I, you know, when I design something in my office because we've learned that there's something dangerous about our product, I don't just design it and then say, okay, I've done my job, uh everything's gonna be fine. I go down to the floor and make sure that it's being manufactured properly, and I don't wait months, let alone years and years and years, while the danger is out there associated with my product. So that's that's just an example of how you know we create, we utilized these themes that ultimately uh persuaded jurors because they understood that from their own perspective, you know, when you have when you are involved in creating a danger and you have the wherewithal, and it's foreseeable, and you have the wherewithal for correcting it, you don't wait months and years to do that.

SPEAKER_00 36:58

Yeah, it was one of the defense themes. Hey, we're just we're just pharmacies. We take orders from doctors. When we receive a script, what are we supposed to do? It's our job to fill a script. We're not there to evaluate whether this is drug-seeking behavior or something else. We get valid scripts, we fill the scripts, that's all we do. Was that part of the defense theme?

SPEAKER_01 37:22

Sure, it was. The problem with that, with that theme was that you know there's there are registrants under the Control Substance Act, excuse me, and they have responsibilities themselves. And one of the responsibilities is to do due diligence with respect to every script and to document it. So I'm sure that you know your audience, lawyers, and and other people who are watching this know that there are times when you present a script, whether it's for an antibiotic or it's for a uh a um, you know, any type of drug, and there's a concern about whether it's there's a drug interaction because of other drugs you're taking, or because there's some danger associated with the script, the pharmacist calls the doctor and says, hey, Doc, did you really mean to give this patient 25 pills of 50 milligrams of oxycontin? Isn't five or six enough? I mean, what are you treating them for? So we that yes, that was a defense, and the defense was, of course, that there were a lot, that it was the DEA's fault, it was the FDA's fault, it was the bad doctor's fault, it was the patient's fault, it was criminals' fault, it was cartel's fault. Um, but you know, we had to prove that their conduct was a substantial factor in creating the epidemic. And under Ohio law, uh they were jointly and severally liable for that. And of course, if the uh if there's bad conduct that's foreseeable, yeah, that's not a defense. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

SPEAKER_00 39:05

Yeah, it so I I I'm always fascinated by how lawyers develop themes, and and I know you are a master at it, and so is certainly Mark Lanier is as well. I've attended some of his seminars, and he's very good about using analogies. One of the in reading about the case, one of the themes that at least I read about that that you and your team used was these pharmacies, it's not a gumball machine. These aren't human vending machines that are just churning out pills for money. And I love that theme. Not a gumball machine and not a vending machine. That's just such who came up with that? That's so good.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

That's all mark. That's all marked. And of course, we had a we had a gumball machine uh in the courtroom. And uh one of these old gumball machines that you know you put your money in and and and the and the piece of gum comes out. Uh while we're while we're on that, uh, you know, in terms of visuals, as you know, having having attended his seminars, his he's very big on visuals. On the causation issue, about how, you know, to negate this claim that there were lots of other people that are responsible for this. If you've ever been in Judge Polster's courtroom, if you look out the window, there is the Detroit Superior Viaduct Bridge. It's blue. Okay. So we kept looking out this window and looking out this window. He said, Pete, he said, uh, what tell me about that bridge? I said, well, you know, it's a bridge that connects the east side to the west side. There's thousands of cars that go across this bridge every day. He said, What if we were to create from Legos a model that looks just like this bridge? And he said, What if we were to, on the on the argument that they didn't uh contribute to cause this, what if we were to jury rig this bridge so that if you took out one piece of Lego, the bridge collapses? That's amazing. All right, so sure enough, we built this model bridge out of Legos, looks just like the bridge that you see from Judge Polster's courtroom. And in closing argument, in rebuttal, after they had said that there were lots of other people responsible, we he said in a closing argument, look, when you build a bridge, there are lots of people responsible for designing and building it, and then there are lots of people involved in maintaining the bridge so that people who travel across that bridge every day can be assured that it's going to be that it's going to stand, that it's going to be safe. And it all it takes is one of these players to not do their job to cause a catastrophe. And he he we brought the bridge out in the middle of the closing argument, put it on a table, and he said, just like that bridge, this is what happens if one defendant, one person doesn't do their job, and we he removed one of the Lego pieces, and the bridge collapsed in front of the jury.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

Absolutely incredible. And he came up with that during trial.

SPEAKER_01 42:37

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 42:39

Who built this Lego, this bridge?

SPEAKER_01 42:43

Martin has uh two um two guys, Juan and Jesse, uh, who are both former military guys, and uh uh they've run all of his audio visual work and stuff, and he they found somebody to create the model um during trial.

SPEAKER_00 43:05

So it's so incredible. Peter, we've been we've been going at I could literally talk to you all day about this case. Tell us maybe one or two more things about the trial, and then I have to ask you a closing question to to get you out of here to try to keep this within a reasonable amount of time because we could talk forever.

SPEAKER_01 43:26

Well, um, you know, it was hard to, as much of the defendants wanted to say to the jury that this was just one case. Um, it was hard for them to um not have the jury understand that this was a case that had uh national importance. I mean, look, we were we were looking at national data, not just Lake and Trumbull County data. You know, we were talking about the federal government and the DEA and and all that. And um I celebrated the verdict at Johnny's downtown with a couple of my partners. Mark went got on his plane, went back to Houston. And uh and then suddenly I started getting emails from the jurors uh that they had been following what was happening in the paper. We we were getting into the second phase of the trial, which was the abatement uh phase in May of 22, and I was getting emails from the jury, and they want to know how I celebrate it. And I said, I had this, there's this restaurant downtown at Johnny's, and and uh so we we we had a nice dinner that night. And they said, Well, we're getting together every month as a juror, as a jury, because you know, we've made a lot of friendships, and uh we're we're uh going to have a dinner at Johnny's restaurant where we're all gonna congregate and celebrate uh what we did for this country.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

Incredible. Are you still in touch with any of the jurors? Yes, yes. That is just absolutely amazing. What a what a great story. And uh, you know, just so people understand, this was a bifurcated or really a two-phase case. Can you just explain that to our listeners?

SPEAKER_01 45:29

Sure. So public nuisance is a legal claim, but it's it sounds in what's called equity. Uh, you can do public nuisance claim and seek legal damages, compensatory, past and present and future uh compensatory damages. Or, and or you can ask for injunctive relief, in other words, that the court determine how the defendant should change their conduct. And we got that in this case. And secondly, we can you we can ask for monetary awards in order to abate the epidemic. Those are equitable, uh, those are that's equitable relief. And so generally there's not the jury doesn't decide equitable relief. They only decided liability. And so that's what we did in this case. We we bifurcated the case, they they determined liability. Uh, and then ultimately uh in May of 2022, we tried the equitable remedy of abatement and injunctive relief before the court, and the court awarded uh his his verdict at that point.

SPEAKER_00 46:41

Amazing. And what was the ultimate verdict, Peter?

SPEAKER_01 46:43

So it was $650 million uh to be shared among Lake and Trumbull County to be paid out over a 15-year period of time, to be monitored by the court in terms of whether or not it was the expenditures, the money was being properly spent. It obviously had guardrails associated with it. Um that case went up on appeal. In the meantime, while the case was up on appeal, uh we settled the national case involving the CVS Walgreens in Walmart. They agreed to pay, I think it's about 14.5 or 15 billion dollars. Uh uh the total, by the way, the total settlements that we've reached with all defendants across this distribution chain is about $60 billion, paid out over a number of years. It has serious and significant guardrails associated with it. It's not like the tobacco settlement where the monies went into the coffers of government. Um, this is actually every almost every state has an abatement trust fund. The subdivisions got some of the money, the state got a small share, about 15%, and then there are these uh trust funds that uh that where you can apply to um to be funded for various research, for addiction treatment centers, foster care, etc. So that's that's how it worked. Um ultimately uh the good news is that the money started flowing about three years ago. And uh the latest statistics from the last two years have demonstrated that opioid-related deaths have been reduced in our country by about 35 percent. So at its height, we were losing uh more more than 170, between 175,000 and 250,000 people per year from opioid-related deaths. That of course doesn't count the millions of people that have opioid use disorder. And the the epidemiologists, including the one that we use in this case, have told us that if you if you look at opioid-related deaths, which are reportable, you can extrapolate that you're that, and and to the extent they're being reduced, you can extrapolate from that how successful you are in treating people with opioid use disorder. And uh so I you know I think it's working. Uh obviously, we're proud of the impact that we've had, and uh it's just the perfect example of how the judicial system does work in really great ways.

SPEAKER_00 49:34

Yeah, that's uh it's such an incredible ending to an amazing, amazing case, an amazing trial, and and an amazing group of lawyers who risked their own time and money to make a difference. And congratulations to you. Congratulations to your team. I I so much enjoyed this. I cannot let you go, Peter, without asking this question, which is what I ask of all my guests. You are truly one of the premier lawyers, not just in Ohio, but across the country. Can you give some advice or guidance to younger lawyers who want to handle these big, mass, complex cases?

SPEAKER_01 50:18

You know, it it's in many ways is different than handling the single event case. In many, in many ways, it's the same. So, you know, when we're representing a client in a personal injury case, whether it's an auto accident case, a medical malpractice case, or a product liability case, you know, we're we're obtaining justice for that individual. But oftentimes our cases, indeed, the jury verdicts that we we get, particularly, you know, set rules of conduct uh way beyond the individual case. And so I've always been proud of the fact, setting aside mass torts, that our cases, Andy, you're in my cases, make a difference not only for the individual, but for our society in general. And to then have the ability to have a direct impact uh in a in a large, complex case like that, of course, is a real honor and a privilege. And so my point is that you know whether you're a single lawyer law office uh or a larger law firm with a bunch of lawyers or uh great trial lawyers, you can make a difference. And your success not only provides you um a nice standard of living for yourself, but it allows you to then invest in other cases that can make a difference to not only other people, but people uh across our society. And I think uh, you know, I've been doing this for 50 years. I couldn't be prouder of what it is that we as trial lawyers do for our country. And uh and to get a little bit of recognition for what we do is uh is great, but we know ourselves how important a role that we play uh in making sure that uh you know products are safer and using our justice system and our juries to make sure that that happens.

SPEAKER_00 52:25

100%. So well said, Peter, I I just loved this conversation. Thank you, thank you, thank you for doing this.

SPEAKER_01 52:33

Andy, uh, by the way, thank you for everything that you're doing. I've I've watched all of your podcasts. You're doing a great thing uh for our community, and uh you do a great job in interviewing uh lawyers like me. And so uh keep up the great work.

SPEAKER_00 52:49

I appreciate you saying that. It means a lot. Thank you.