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# Court Rejects ‘Shotgun’ Pleading Against Pfizer
- URL: https://www.fdaweb.com/court-rejects-shotgun-pleading-against-pfizer/
- Published: 2016-02-17T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-15T02:36:39.000Z
- Author: David McFarland
- Tags: Drugs, #legacy-id-D5134803

> A Florida federal court has dismissed a number of claims brought by a plaintiff against Pfizer alleging that its Prempro caused her to develop breast cancer. Attorney **Michelle Yeary** (Dechert) writes in an online blog [post](http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=ae529761-c230-4db7-8649-124627501de4&ref=fdaweb.com) that the pleading’s 36-page fact section appeared to be an attempt to cover all bases in hopes of sorting things out later. She says the court had difficulty matching facts to claims.  
>  
> The suit included claims for strict liability design defect, failure to warn, negligence, and negligent misrepresentation, Yeary says, and stumbled on all four counts. She says the pleading made general, conclusory statements about the drug’s risks outweighing the benefits and the product being unreasonably dangerous. “But when the court went looking for the facts to support those claims, plaintiff pointed to allegations scattered throughout the fact section of the complaint,” she says. “The court said it wasn’t its job to sift through the facts and puzzle together the grounds for plaintiff’s claim.”  
>  
> According to Yeary, the failure to warn claim had the same flaws plus a few more specific problems, including that the plaintiff did not plead the actual risks warned of, whether that warning accompanied the product she received, or how the warnings should have been revised to no longer be inadequate. “In other words,” she writes, “if you are going to allege failure to warn you have to include the warning and your proposed change to the warning in the complaint. And relying on the drug’s label by attaching it to the briefing on the motion to dismiss doesn’t fix the problem.”  
>  
> The negligence claim was dismissed because the plaintiff failed to allege that the company violated a state tort duty and that it could have acted in line with its federal obligations while lawfully discharging its state duty.  
>  
> Finally, the post says, the court dismissed the negligent misrepresentation claim primarily because the plaintiff relied on a version of the drug’s label that significantly post-dated plaintiff’s use of the product.  
>  
> “Based on all of these problems,” Yeary concludes, “the court tossed all the claims and told plaintiff to start over. But the decision imposes fairly stringent pleading requirements, ones that will either find us back here talking about another successful motion to dismiss or will result in a complaint that is more factually dense and precise at the same time.”