Amy Laurendeau  

Amy Laurendeau has spent much of the last few years defending Johnson & Johnson and some subsidiaries in mass litigation over opioids and doing it successfully.

Most recently, Laurendeau won the dismissal of a large lawsuit by a major group of Maine hospitals against drugmakers and others. The suit claimed the defendants’ marketing produced an oversupply of opioids in the state, increasing the burden on the hospitals. Eastern Maine Medical Center v. Teva Pharmaceuticals, PORSC-CV-2021-00333 (Cumb’ld. Cnty. Super. Ct., remanded Feb. 2, 2022).

“These claims, I would say, are even one step further removed from the claims that were brought by the states and the municipalities” in other opioid lawsuits, Laurendeau said. After an all-day hearing, the judge ruled on Feb. 13 that the hospitals had offered no specific allegations of causation or linkage between the defendants’ actions and harm to the hospitals, she said.

In early 2022, Laurendeau was a lead member of the team that represented J&J in opioid litigation brought by West Virginia, one of the few states to opt out of the national settlement. The company reached a $99 million settlement with the state on April 18 last year following about three weeks of trial. In Re: Opioid Litigation, 21-C-9000 MFR (Kanawha Cnty. Cir. Ct.).

Quickly after that settlement, she returned to complex litigation in Los Angeles, defending J&J’s Motrin against allegations it can cause a rare but very serious rash. The lawsuit began in 2008, and a jury awarded the plaintiff $48 million in 2011. Six years later, the Court of Appeal reversed and remanded. Laurendeau was to lead the retrial.

After a series of delays, including from the pandemic, the retrial was set for last year. Then, after three months of pretrial proceedings — and three failed attempts by the plaintiff to disqualify the judge — Laurendeau won a motion to dismiss the case because the plaintiff had failed to bring the case to trial within the three-year statutory deadline following a remand.

“There was just a long record of plaintiff’s counsel trying to delay the case rather than diligently moving the case toward trial.” The dismissal is now on appeal. Trejo vs. Johnson & Johnson, B324219 (Cal. App. Dist. 2, filed Oct. 18, 2022).

Laurendeau said she is confident she could have won the case on the merits. “We had several strong defenses and were prepared. … But a complete dismissal defense win for our client is obviously a great result however it comes.”

Apart from litigating matters for Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies, Laurendeau also helped the company teach other young lawyers to do it. She served as a faculty member in J&J’s unique Pathways Trial Academy & Fellowship Program, an intensive trial advocacy training program, which concluded late last month. The students were a half-dozen diverse junior partners at larger law firms.

The goal of the program is to help J&J “increase the diversity of their outside trial counsel and also help some of these very talented, young, diverse lawyers make the transition to become first chair trial lawyers,” she said.

— Don DeBenedictis