A senior in-house attorney for Johnson & Johnson told a pair of judges on Monday that an alliance between a former member of his legal team and talc plaintiffs’ attorney Andy Birchfield was the “most egregious breach of ethical obligations I have ever heard of, ever seen.”
At an evidentiary hearing, Erik Haas, Johnson & Johnson’s worldwide vice president of litigation, told Steve Brody, a partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C., that he was shocked when his former outside counsel, John Conlan, teamed up with Birchfield, of Montgomery, Alabama’s Beasley Allen, to propose settling the talc litigation for $19 billion.
