In the Superior Court of Pennsylvania - How Appealing

summary judgment in these 14 appeals has returned Pennsylvania courts to the
judicial mainstream in hormone therapy cases.
Because the Superior Court’s opinion in this case has faithfully applied
longstanding Pennsylvania law in holding that the plaintiffs’ invocations of the
discovery rule present questions of fact for the jury to decide, defendants’ Petition
for Allowance of Appeal should be denied.
B. Defendants Misapprehend Pennsylvania Law In Arguing That
A Plaintiff Must Investigate The Cause Of Her Injury Even In
The Absence Of Any Reasonable Basis For Concluding That
The Injury Resulted From A Third–Party’s Wrongful Conduct
The second ground on which defendants seek allowance of appeal lacks merit
both as a matter of law and as a matter of fact on the record of these cases.
In 13 of these 14 cases, defendants moved for summary judgment on statute
of limitations grounds based solely on plaintiffs’ complaints and associated fact
sheets, in the absence of any discovery whatsoever. As the Superior Court
recognized, it is thus far from undisputed that these plaintiffs failed to conduct any
investigation into their claims before the results of the WHI study became public,
and the record simply does not support defendants’ assertion in that regard.
In the Coleman case, which is the one case among these 14 lawsuits in which
extensive discovery occurred, the record shows that Ms. Coleman sought to learn
the cause of her breast cancer but reasonably failed to discover that combination
hormone replacement therapy medications were to blame.
As the Superior Court’s opinion explains:
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