Lamb McErlane PC partner Rocco P. Imperatrice, III is quoted in the Law.com / Legal Intelligencer article. He is currently serving as liaison counsel for all Defendants in the statewide opioid litigation pending in the Delaware County Court system.

Attorneys attribute the deliberate pace to the huge number of parties involved and the scale of the information they are seeking.

July 5, 2022 – The Legal Intelligencer / Law.com
By: Aleeza Furman, Litigation Reporter

The Delaware County judge overseeing Pennsylvania’s opioid litigation has ordered that all fact discovery for the coordinated cases be completed by the end of the year. The Dec. 31 deadline, if met, would be the first step toward the court returning the scores of cases currently held in the county back to their home venues following years tied up in a nebulous discovery process.

Pennsylvania’s opioid litigation has proceeded slowly since the cases were coordinated before Judge Barry Dozor of the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas in 2018. Attorneys attribute the deliberate pace to the huge number of parties involved and the scale of the information they are seeking.

“There have been millions and millions of pages of paper discovery exchanged,” said Lamb McErlane’s Rocco Imperatrice III, who serves as defense liaison counsel.

With the implementation of the deadline, the coordinated cases could return to their original jurisdictions between mid- to late 2023, according to Imperatrice. That’s the timeline that the court has indicated it hopes to follow, said Imperatrice, but he said there are still potential holdups along the way.

Once fact discovery concludes, Imperatrice said, the parties will move on to expert discovery and then subsequent motions, and those later proceedings do not yet have a scheduled end point.

And even with a fact-discovery deadline set, Imperatrice said whether or not it sticks is a “hard call.”

The Dec. 31 deadline is only the most recent to be scheduled in the litigation. The deadline has already been extended four times, according to an application for extraordinary relief filed by the city of Philadelphia and District Attorney Larry Krasner in May.

The application, which is still pending, asks the state Supreme Court to remand five opioid suits to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and claims that Krasner’s suit was subject to mismanagement in the Delaware County court.

Krasner’s suit, filed on behalf of the state of Pennsylvania, is one of four test cases that have been proceeding while all other cases in the litigation are stayed. The application for extraordinary relief claims the case is “mired in a directionless desert of unconstrained and abusive discovery.”

According to Imperatrice, the new Dec. 31 deadline is a reasonable target that will likely be met.

“A lot is dependent on how the parties may continue to cooperate with discovery in good faith, and whether, to be quite honest, the ongoing discovery discloses more individuals or documents that are relevant and discoverable,” he said.

Dozor’s order leaves room for parties to seek modification, but Imperatrice said the parties involved in the case hope to see fact discovery wrap up on time.

Carmen Belefonte of Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky, who serves as plaintiffs liaison counsel, did not respond to requests for comment.

While none of Pennsylvania’s state-level suits against opioid manufacturers and distributors are close to going to trial, litigation in other jurisdictions continues to progress. On Monday, a federal judge in West Virginia ruled in a $2.5 billion suit that McKesson Corp., AmerisourceBergen Corp. and Cardinal Health Inc. were not responsible for the proliferation of opioid addiction in Cabell County and the city of Huntinton.

Imperatrice said it remains to be seen whether that decision will have any bearing on the cases in Pennsylvania or beyond, but he said it was “clearly a very positive development.”

Read the article here in on Law.com.

Rocco P. Imperatrice, III is a partner in Lamb McErlane’s Newtown Square, PA.  He concentrates his practice upon real estate and land development, commercial litigation (including employment discrimination defense litigation), higher education and corporate and business representation.