Erin M. Bosman

Morrison & Foerster LLP

San Diego, San Francisco

Class actions, mass torts

Bosman, a class actions and mass tort litigator at Morrison & Foerster LLP, has represented health care industry clients including Bayer AG, Fitbit Inc., MicroPort Inc. and McKesson Corp.

During the coronavirus pandemic, she's pitching in to help.

"It's an interesting and challenging time," she said. "The crisis has placed enormous pressure on the business community. One client is designing a new type of ventilator, for example, that will be produced under an open source license." The company, which Bosman declined to name and for whom she is working pro bono, is partnering with nonprofits and manufacturers to start production.

"At MoFo we have put together a covid task force of 50 to 60 partners who are ready to jump in to help existing clients and other," she said. "I work with clients trying to rush mask production. I'm helping another with the distribution of test kits."

The firm's offices in the U.S. and Europe shut everything down on March 12 to work remotely. "That went seamlessly," she said in late March. "The measures we took have been successful. To date no one in the firm has tested positive even as we find creative ways to get things done."

A current ongoing matter is Bosman's role as lead counsel for Prelude Fertility Inc., which has a network of egg-freezing clinics across the U.S., and for its Northern California subsidiary. In March 2018 a cryostorage tank failed at San Francisco-based Pacific Fertility Center. The tank contained several thousand eggs and embryos.

Clinic customers sued, accusing the company of gross negligence in its maintenance, inspection and monitoring of the storage freezer.

Pacific Fertility retained Bosman for her crisis management skills and her product liability expertise; she coordinates the legal team and scientific experts. She is lead litigation counsel in a consolidated potential federal class action and more than 40 individual cases in state court. The federal case is In re: Pacific Fertility Center Litigation, 3:18-cv-01586 (N.D. Cal., filed March 13, 2018).

Her work follows two tracks: on the crisis management side, the MoFo teams works with affected patients to provide information and services. On the litigation level, she has succeeded in obtaining dismissal of some claims, narrowing the scope of the action. In February, the opposing sides argued over class certification before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline S. Corley.

"Our opposition to class certification points out the need to look at each individual situation," Bosman said. Meanwhile, she has taken an interlocutory appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a bid to compel arbitration of the cases.

"We're defending our clients in a very unfortunate situation," Bosman said.

-- John Roemer