Commercial Litigation Update

Finds that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services put its “thumb on the scale” 

On Monday February 8, a judge in the Eastern District of Texas again rejected the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR) rules on the grounds that the Rules continued to “put a thumb on the scale” for the arbitrator’s reliance on the Qualified Payment Amount (QPA) contrary to the statutory language of the No Surprises Act.

We have previously discussed (here and here) the complex issues surrounding the resumption of jury trials during the COVID-19 pandemic. We cautioned that the various experimental efforts to resume jury trials taking place in courts around the country were likely to meet with a host of practical and jurisprudential problems. A few weeks later, it appears that our assessment was, if anything, too optimistic. Many of the states that had been taking first steps toward resuming jury trials in some form are now shutting down those experiments because of the spike in COVID-19 cases that is ...