By Donna Walter
Reprinted with permission of the St. Louis Daily Record

Clayton-based Carey & Danis is poised to serve in a leadership role managing the multidistrict litigation against Bayer AG over its anti-bleeding drug Trasylol.

The law firm filed eight lawsuits with the federal court in Miami on Friday alleging the drug caused renal failure to patients in Missouri, California, Georgia, Indiana, Florida, New Mexico and Wisconsin between 2000 and 2007. In six of those eight cases, the patients died. The plaintiffs allege Bayer marketed and distributed Trasylol without warning doctors and patients of the increased risk of death associated with the drug. Trasylol is used to reduce blood loss during heart surgery.

One of those suits, filed last month in the St. Louis-based federal court, alleges the drug caused the death of Samuel Nakis, 81, who had open heart surgery in December 2005. Soon after Nakis got out of surgery, he began experiencing renal failure. He was placed on dialysis, and he died about a month after his surgery.

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated 18 lawsuits filed in 14 federal courts and transferred them to the Miami-based court earlier this month.

Joseph Danis, the law partner of John J. Carey, said he expects the firm will file about 125 cases in all - and up to 70 within the next three weeks. He said it's likely the MDL will contain fewer than 2,000 cases.

"I'm speculating, but based upon what's happened to date and based upon our knowledge of the number of so-called potential cases that are out there, we do not anticipate that this will be a case involving five figures of plaintiffs," he said.

The totals put the firm in a good position to be part of the plaintiffs' management committee, Danis said. A preliminary agreement with the nine other plaintiff law firms includes the Clayton firm on the committee, but Danis cautioned that the federal judge overseeing the MDL has the final say.

"Any firm interested in working can find themselves in a very meaningful role. This group is not an exclusionary group," he said.

Already, the 10 firms are busy — another factor favoring the local firm.

"The defendants have already produced 3 [million] to 4 million documents. And we've all divided them up and are all in the process of reviewing them, which puts us ahead of anybody else," said Jeff Lowe, a solo practitioner in Clayton who is working of counsel to Carey & Danis on the Trasylol litigation.

The lawyers also said they were happy with the choice of venue.

Danis, admittedly speaking from a plaintiff's perspective, said the juries in the Southern District of Florida are "very fair." He also noted that the judge overseeing the MDL, Donald M. Middlebrooks, was appointed by President Bill Clinton.

The court was one of the venues requested by the plaintiff attorneys, according to the MDL panel's transfer order.

Bayer moved for the MDL to be in either the District of Connecticut or the Northern District of Georgia, the order said.

Lowe said the judge has a good reputation for moving his docket quickly.

"These types of cases, sometimes they go on for years and years, [but] ... we expect everything to be moved pretty promptly," he said.

A representative of Bayer did not immediately return a call seeking comment.