The AM Law Daily was kind enough to post the transcript of Mark Lanier's opening statement in the Neurontin trial that was called off. I read this passage and had to share it.
"Please understand, you're not going to have a lot of documents on this stuff because you will hear David Franklin explain that the people in his job, he was told, "Do not be putting much of this stuff we're doing in writing." As one of the coworkers said, "It just takes one phone call to turn us all in." They're not allowed to leave the slide, the snake oil salesman slide, they're not allowed to leave those presentations with the doctors.
They go to seminars where they're taught how to do this, and they're handed tablets, and across the tablets it says "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" to remind them what kind of trouble the company can get in if people write stuff down. So any note that they would take they would take understanding ultimately a jury may get to see it one day. So a lot of what was done was done by phone, it was done face-to-face.
Or there was a time where they were taught how to give a fair and balanced presentation on a videotape. And so the videotape plays, and as the videotape plays, the executives stop the videotape, and they say to everybody, "Okay, now, ignore everything you just heard, and let me tell you how we're going to do it. We were required to show you that."
Now, what Lanier says isn't evidence. But on the other hand, if those "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" tablets didn't exist, there would have been a mistrial.
If not for product liability lawsuits, we might never know just how corrupt pharmaceutical companies can be.