BATON ROUGE, La. — A Louisiana appeals court panel vacated judgment in a groundwater contamination lawsuit filed by a group of individuals and businesses that own property near the former Dresser Industrial Valve Operations Facility in Rapides Parish, La., that required the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) to direct responsible parties to submit a plan addressing the alleged pollution, holding that the plaintiffs improperly sought declaratory relief through a summary proceeding and that the trial court imposed an unrequested mandatory injunction without an evidentiary hearing.

LOS ANGELES — In a minute order addressing multiple motions in four related suits, a federal judge in California denied the state’s motion for a preliminary injunction to block an order from U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright authorizing, pursuant to the Defense Production Act (DPA), the reopening and continued operation of pipelines that had been shut down after a 2015 oil spill and denied in part the state’s motion to enforce a 2020 consent decree governing the operation of the pipelines.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — The evidence shows that asbestos-talc study authors took steps to ensure their study didn’t include individuals in a previous study or those with other, more traditional asbestos exposures, a federal judge in Virginia said in denying Pecos River Talc LLC’s summary judgment motion on its trade libel claim and granting summary judgment to the authors.

CINCINNATI — Affirming dismissal of a suit that medical providers filed against the sponsor and the administrator of a self-insured health plan, the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals said that under a 1991 decision that one panel member explicitly criticized, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act expressly preempts “third-party healthcare providers’ negligent-misrepresentation and promissory-estoppel claims when those claims arise out of an ERISA-plan administrator’s oral assurances about the terms of coverage or reimbursement under an ERISA-governed plan.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Texas federal judge’s decision to dismiss a patent holder’s suit against Volkswagen Group of America Inc. with prejudice and to award more than $200,000 in attorney fees; the panel also dismissed counsel William P. Ramey III’s appeal of the judge’s sanctions that held him jointly and severally liable for the fee award because Ramey failed to timely appeal the sanction in his own name.

ST. LOUIS — An auto insurer did not act in bad faith in handling an insured’s claim for the total loss of his vehicle because there is no evidence in the record showing that the appraisal company’s valuation of the vehicle was flawed or that the insurer acted in bad faith by relying on the valuation when making a settlement offer to the insured, the majority of an Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel said in affirming a district court’s partial summary judgment ruling.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Ruling that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “adequately considered and reasonably explained” a decision to uphold a final rule adding two widely used per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to the list of hazardous substances covered by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, a District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel denied five consolidated petitions filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and six trade associations seeking to overturn the designation due to various alleged errors.

SAN FRANCISCO — A split Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Aug. 19 found that a lower court erred in dismissing False Claims Act (FCA) claims against Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. because claims that the company violated the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) by paying physicians to prescribe its drugs were adequately pleaded; the court affirmed dismissal of the FCA conspiracy claim against Regeneron and dismissal of all claims against Sanofi Aventis US LLC.