While attorneys might not agree on whether or not the state Superior Court has been issuing an increasing number of important decisions as nonprecedential opinions, nearly all attorneys who spoke with the Law Weekly agreed that the inability to use the unreported opinions is an ongoing problem.
Late last year, the Superior Court issued a decision in Parr v. Ford Motor, finding that a contested theory of injury caused in a rollover accident could be argued before a jury. A month earlier, the court nixed a plaintiff’s argument that an antidepressant led to an abortion in Thomas v. SmithKline Beecham. Although both decisions arguably had statewide importance, they were initially issued as nonprecedential memoranda. In January, the Parr opinion was reissued by the court as a published opinion, but at least one attorney is seeing a trend.
