A federal judge in New Jersey issued a rebuke to lawyers from a plaintiffs firm over their attempt to withdraw from representing a client who seeks to litigate his suit over hypertension drug Benicar rather than join a settlement reached in the corresponding multidistrict litigation.

“If counsel is now ‘scared off’ by the prospect of paying for trial, counsel should not have undertaken the representation of plaintiff in the first instance,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider said in the case, McDaniel v. Daiichi Sankyo.