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Friday, November 8, 2013

Lawyer recalls first meeting with woman who started Risperdal litigation

Today's post was shared by Legal Newsline and comes from legalnewsline.com



Brian McCormick remembers meeting Victoria Starr back in 2007 when he first started working for Sheller P.C.
The Oregon woman had approached the Philadelphia law firm about three years prior about filing a qui tam lawsuit on behalf of the U.S. government against the makers of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal.”
risperdal
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Starr, a former sales representative for Janssen Pharmaceutica, a wholly-owned subsidiary of drugmaker Johnson & Johnson, felt as if she was being encouraged and pressured to market Risperdal off-label.
McCormick’s law firm filed Starr’s qui tam suit in April 2004, three months after the woman quit her job.
She had begun working for Janssen in about 2001.
On Monday, Johnson & Johnson announced that it would be paying more than $2.2 billion to resolve civil and criminal claims relating to allegations that the company marketed Risperdal, a drug primarily designed to treat bi-polar disorder and schizophrenia, for uses other than those approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
The pharmaceutical manufacturer will pay $1.673 billion to resolve the allegations of off-label marketing for Risperdal and sister drug Invega, the resolution marking the largest involving a single drug in U.S. history, and the third-largest healthcare fraud settlement involving one company, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The massive settlement that resulted from a...
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