PPH Litigation

Primary Pulmonary Hypertension (PPH) Litigation

Beginning in December 1996, Alex H. MacDonald of our firm undertook leadership of a five-member trial team in the nation's first Fen-Phen pharmaceutical death action, Estate of Mary Linnen vs. American Home Products, et. al. (Middlesex Superior Court, Cambridge, MA).

In April 1998, our Partner, Mr. MacDonald was appointed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, which oversaw the consolidated national diet pill litigation (MDL [multi-district litigation] #1203, In re Diet Pill Litigation) to the Plaintiff's Discovery and Expert Witness Committees, where he played a key role on behalf of plaintiffs between 1998 and 2001. Those efforts contributed to the successfully negotiated $4 billion global settlement of 200,000 Fen-Phen diet pill claims pending in the federal court MDL. That settlement, judicially approved by the federal court on August 30, 2000, is among the largest mass tort resolutions in United States history.

In the years since conclusion of the Linnen trial, Mr. MacDonald has been lead trial counsel in over fifty (50) additional primary pulmonary hypertension (PPH) wrongful death cases arising from Fen-Phen pharmaceutical exposure. These PPH cases, in Massachusetts, Texas, Louisiana, Colorado, Kentucky, New York, Utah, Pennsylvania and Illinois, involve litigation widely acknowledged in the trial bar to comprise among the most sophisticated and serious variety of pharmaceutical/products liability litigation. In each PPH case litigated to date, Mr. MacDonald and his colleagues have prevailed on behalf of their clients. The pivotal role played by Mr. MacDonald and the trial team he led in the national Fen-Phen litigation is chronicled in the book Dispensing with the Truth: The Battle over Fen-Phen (St. Martin's Press, 2001) by Alicia Mundy.