Andrew Bayman

Andy Bayman is a trial lawyer who represents pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, retailers, automotive manufacturers and other major companies in complex and novel product liability and toxic tort cases. He has tried over 20 cases in state and federal courts, many of which are first of kind such as the first pharmaceutical products liability lawsuit ever tried under the theory of “Innovator Liability,” the first MDL bellwether trial involving an atypical femur fracture allegedly caused by Merck’s osteoporosis medicine, Fosamax® and, more recently, the first Zantac case to go to trial.

Andy is often called upon as coordinating and lead counsel on some of the most brand-threatening, high-profile crisis matters for major manufacturers, many of which are in MDLs. He is lead counsel for Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and one of four Defense Co-Leads in personal injury and class actions in the In Re Zantac MDL in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida and in coordinated state court proceedings in various states.

Andy successfully tried the first Zantac case to a defense verdict in Cook County, IL. The plaintiff claimed that ingestion of Zantac for heartburn caused her colon cancer and asked the jury to award $640 million. The American Lawyer recognized Andy as a “Litigator of the Week” for that victory. In his second Zantac trial in Cook County, the jury deadlocked 11-1 in Andy’s client’s favor.

He led a King & Spalding team that successfully argued, alongside co-defendants’ counsel, that the plaintiffs’ general causation experts in the Zantac MDL should be excluded under FRE 702. At the Daubert hearing, Andy argued, among other things, that the plaintiffs’ testing expert used unreliable and unvalidated methodologies with a lack of documentation on how experiments were conducted, and that the expert offered to opine on the testing did not perform any of the analyses or assess their reliability himself but rather parroted the results given to him. After excluding the plaintiffs’ experts in a 340+ page Order, the MDL Court entered summary judgment for the defendants, dismissing thousands of cases and claims and effectively terminating the MDL before any case-specific discovery had begun. The Zantac Daubert win is considered as by far the largest in scale and magnitude of any MDL Daubert win.
Andy has frequently been recognized for his leading practice including by being named as a Product Liability MVP by Law360 and in Chambers Nationwide and Legal 500. He is notably a fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, an honorary society limited to less than .05% of U.S. lawyers.

In addition to his client work, Andy also is the Co-Chair of the firm’s new Product Liability and Mass Tort Practice Group. He served for five years as the Practice Group Leader of King & Spalding’s former Trial & Global Disputes practice group, a diverse group of over 550 litigators in 22 offices globally.