YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — A federal jury in Ohio on April 23 ruled in favor of a railcar company and determined that Norfolk Southern Railway Corp. is completely at fault for the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that exposed residents to toxic chemicals.  The jury also found that Norfolk Southern did not prove that it has paid more than its proportionate share of any common liability for harm to members of the class that sued it.

RICHMOND, Va. — Noting that “[n]o judge requested a poll” on a petition for rehearing en banc, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on April 23 denied rehearing and rehearing en banc of its ruling affirming a lower court order granting a preliminary injunction to a health analytics company alleging tortious interference against an electronic health records (EHR) company that the analytics company says restricted its access to EHR of nursing home residents to monitor their health trends.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in an April 23 per curiam order denied a pair of “urgent requests” for ruling on a motion to stay the entry of sanctions against three lawyers from a law firm representing a patent holder, saying the court would rule on the attorneys’ primary motion “in due course”; the order was issued a day after the attorneys filed a notice of application to the U.S. Supreme Court.

SAN FRANCISCO — Eli Lilly and Co. on April 23 sued four telehealth companies in a federal court alleging that they violated California’s unfair competition and false advertising laws by selling “knockoff compounded tirzepatide drugs,” FDA-approved drugs for diabetes and weight loss.

DENVER — Insurers have no duty to defend or provide coverage to an insured for an underlying environmental contamination suit because the insurers’ pollution exclusions clearly bar coverage for the underlying suit, the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said April 23 in reversing a district court’s ruling.

LONG ISLAND, N.Y. — An expert’s use of artificial intelligence ChatGPT to confirm his opinions in a product defect case does not warrant his exclusion nor does his lack of an engineering degree mean that he doesn’t qualify as an expert, a federal judge in New York said April 23 in denying a tool retailer’s motion.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments April 23 in a dispute over whether the District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals erred when it determined that a group of liquid fuel sellers and producers lacked standing to challenge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to waive new Clean Air Act (CAA) standards for automobile emissions as they apply to California.

SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal magistrate judge on April 22 granted Google LLC’s request for consideration of documents incorporated by reference and granted in part and denied in part with leave to amend Google’s motion to dismiss in a California unfair competition law (UCL) and Sherman Act antitrust suit against Google by Yelp Inc. for “numerous anti-competitive practices, including stealing information from Yelp’s website and passing it off as Google’s own,” finding that “Yelp has sufficiently alleged monopoly power” but that tying of local search services to general search services is time-barred.