While Elmiron lawsuits are piling up, a few important questions to address include who manufactures the medication and what it takes to sue them. Video source: How much will it cost me to use the maker of Elmiron? Do You Have Elmiron-Related Questions? Fill in the form below and Jerry will do his best to […]
While Elmiron lawsuits are piling up, a few important questions to address include who manufactures the medication and what it takes to sue them.
Video source: How much will it cost me to use the maker of Elmiron?
Elmiron is manufactured by a company in Germany known as bene pharmaChem GmbH & Co. KG. They actually do the manufacturing of the pill.
But I think what will be more familiar to people, actually worldwide but especially here in the United States, is who actually bought it to market, who got it approved, who marketed it, and who sold it.
And unlike other drugs, which really have a very limited number of entities involved in that process, for some reason, Elmiron has a lot of entities involved. The owners of the license at whatever point in time kept on moving the license around to different corporate entities, selling it, trading it, whatever.
So it started off with a couple companies that have the first name of Baker. We’re going to talk about one of them because that one took over from the other one, so we’ll start off with Baker Norton. At that point in time, all the way in the beginning, before it was even a drug approved by the FDA, Baker Norton was owned by another company called Ivax.
Now, both Baker Norton and Ivax are essentially owned by Teva. Baker Norton held the NDA — that’s the new drug application. That’s the application that a drug company has to file with the FDA to get approval to market the drug. And they held the NDA until 1997.
In 1997, a California company called Alza, A-L-Z-A, Corporation, which now is owned by Johnson & Johnson, they held the NDA from ’98 to ’02, 2002. Like I said, Alza got acquired by Johnson & Johnson and one of their subsidiaries, and there’s a whole bunch of Johnson & Johnson entities involved with Elmiron over the years.
Janssen Research & Development held the NDA from 2002 to 2004. Janssen Pharmaceuticals held it from 2008 to present. Janssen Ortho was involved. Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical held the NDA from 2004 to present. All of those are Johnson & Johnson-related entities. And then at some point in time, approximately 2005, Johnson & Johnson and their related entities made an arrangement with Bayer to co-promote Elmiron and to sell it, giving Bayer all the proceeds of the sales to the urologists in the United States. So we have a bunch of Bayer entities involved in this as well.
Parker Waichman – as most other personal injury law firms taking cases such as this, and then Elmiron in particular, do so under what we call a contingency-fee agreement, where the law firm Parker Waichman will advance all the expenses of the litigation.
You will not have to lay out any money for the litigation. We will lay out all the funds required to bring your case to trial. This could be very expensive. Doing discovery costs millions and millions of dollars.
We’re going to get, I would imagine, tens of millions of pages of documents and data from the defendants. Some defendants like to give us even more information than we are entitled to or that we need. Because they flood us with documents, you have to try to find a needle in a haystack.
But what we do is we hire experts who have electronic tools, who can mine the information that we get and ferret out those bad documents. (“Bad” meaning bad for the defendants).
When you can show the defendants committed bad acts, really bad acts, bad conduct, hid things they should have disclosed … that drives the amount our clients are going to get. And that’s why it’s so important that we do the work so we have firsthand knowledge of these bad documents, so that it benefits our clients.
Like I said, it’s going to cost a lot of money to bring this litigation to its conclusion, to a successful conclusion, successful for our clients. And in order to do that, we’re going to be spending a lot of money.
We have our document examiners – those experts cost millions of dollars, and they get paid upfront. We’re going to have the best experts in the world and they’re very expensive. But that’s what they cost.
It’s gonna cost a lot for all the attorneys and paralegals that are dedicated to this case and this case only.
But the good thing is, and the thing that benefits our clients, is that Parker Waichman represents a lot of clients, a lot of clients that are claiming that Elmiron has destroyed their retina. And a lot of the expenses that we’ve spoken about already will benefit all the clients, so if there is a resolution to this case, we could amortize or spread those expenses out over all of our clients, so that the amount charged to a particular client is relatively small.
If we only had one or two cases or five or ten or 20 cases, the burden to every client would be extreme. But because we represent a lot of clients in this litigation, they’re going to benefit by having us allocate or amortize the expenses in an equitable way.
Everybody’s not going to get charged the same amount. It’s going to be equitably done with court supervision or court-appointed special masters or with settlement administrators, and it will be equitably done, spread throughout all of our clients.
Now some of the expenses are client-related. For example, if we get medical records in your case from your doctors, those are your expenses. Those do not get spread to other clients. If we get a report from your doctor and we have to pay your doctor for that report, that is your expense. If we meet with your doctor and we have to pay your doctor for that meeting, that is not spread; that is your expense.
But at the end of the day, based upon my almost 40 years of experience doing this, the way we handle it is most effective for all of our clients.
At Parker Waichman, we generally do not believe the doctor has any direct responsibility in this case, or in any cases like this.
When we go visit with the doctors of our clients, we almost always find the doctor was held in the dark. They were kept in the dark just like you were, just like the FDA was, and they had no way to know that Elmiron had any toxic effect on the eye or the retina.
Now, there might be an oddball out there.
Did your doctor do the clinical trial? Was your doctor involved with the defendants along the line and learned something that nobody else knew?
Well, that’s a very odd situation. They’re probably out there, but they’re odd. So generally, we don’t believe doctors are liable; we believe the doctors were duped just like you were, and therefore, this is not a medical malpractice case, and in our retainers, we will tell you that.
We believe the doctors were duped just like you were.
Now, if we do come across information in your case where we find the doctor was involved in the clinical trial, that he hid the evidence from the FDA, that he hid the evidence from others that were involved, other investigators in the trial, well, then we might have a discussion.
I would say you should talk to your doctor about your injury. You should talk to your ophthalmologist about your problem with your vision.
If you’re experiencing any of Elmiron side effects, you need to see your ophthalmologist to discuss with him your taking Elmiron and inquire as to whether the damage to your eye was caused by Elmiron.
And then you may need a referral to a retina specialist so you can have that non-invasive imaging test that we discussed earlier performed to diagnose whether your problems are caused by Elmiron.
However, you should not talk to your doctor about the case, because you will now be releasing information that you very likely got from us, and that is protected by the attorney-client privilege.
So we wouldn’t want you to waive that privilege as to all your conversations with your doctor.
So you do not talk to your doctor about the case, but you most certainly talk to your doctor about your problems with vision and what can be done to diagnose whether Elmiron is responsible and what can be done to treat the damage to your retina.
Elmiron is manufactured by a German company called bene pharmaChem GmbH & Co. US marketing and sales entities include a lot of companies like Johnson & Johnson, Bayer and Baker Norton.
Our law firm is taking Elmiron cases under a contingency fee agreement in which we advance the out-of-pocket expenses of the litigation. These expenses may include hiring experts, processing the documents, and all sorts of other management and investigation tasks. Those expenses can be very substantial but they may be spread among all our clients who claim their eye damage or loss of vision was caused by Elmiron.
Doctors usually have no direct responsibility in cases like this. Unless they can be proven to have been hiding information, we believe doctors were duped just like you were.
You can (and should) talk to your doctor about your condition, history of taking Elmiron, test results and your diagnosis. However you should not talk to your doctor about your Elmiron lawsuit, because you will now be releasing information you very likely got from us and that is protected by the attorney-client privilege.
For more information on Elmiron lawsuits check out:
If Elmiron has harmed you or a member of your family and you are interested in filing a lawsuit to recover monetary compensation, contact Parker Waichman by calling 1-800-YOUR-LAWYER (1-800-968-7529) for a free case review today.
