American Healthcare Leader: “Wilkinson Stekloff Help Bayer Stand Its Ground”

WASHINGTON — After the Wilkinson Stekloff team won a decisive trial victory for Bayer in a $600 million certified consumer class action lawsuit brought on behalf of One A Day multivitamin consumers, American Healthcare Leader’s (AHL) Sara Deeter highlighted how Walsh and Eskovitz’s “confidence and strategy” helped Bayer win a “resounding victory” in such a “high stakes” case.

Without calling any witnesses in the defense case, the Wilkinson Stekloff team — led by Sean Eskovitz, Alex Walsh, James Rosenthal, and Kieran Gostin — relied on devastating cross-examinations of plaintiffs’ expert and fact witnesses, which were “pivotal” and “yielded further important insights.” The cross-examinations were so effective that it only took the jury one hour to reject plaintiffs’ claims that Bayer had misrepresented the health benefits of One A Day multivitamins. 

The feature acknowledged one of Wilkinson Stekloff’s key strategies to engaging with the jury in a case that centered on “relatively complicated biological issues.” The class action suit specifically challenged as false and misleading Bayer’s claims that One A Day multivitamins support heart health, immunity, and physical energy.

“According to Walsh, one of the biggest challenges of the case was the need to break down relatively complicated biological issues and explain them to the jury in an accessible and engaging way. ‘I firmly believe that our job as trial lawyers—and the surest path to victory—is not to tell the jurors what the science shows,’ Walsh says, ‘but to teach them the concepts and principles they need to understand and apply to decide the case.’”

Deeter also highlighted how Wilkinson Stekloff, which has now grown to over 40 lawyers, was “founded with the exclusive purpose of winning high-stakes trials” and “bringing up the next generation of trial lawyers.”

In almost four years, Wilkinson Stekloff has tried 17 cases to verdict across the country, winning trial after trial. In 2018 alone, Wilkinson Stekloff won all three of its high-profile jury trials (each led by a different partner), achieved a positive result in a bench trial led by another partner, and won several other pre-trial victories in high-stakes cases.

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