Eli Lilly Successfully Bamboozles the Legal System

When he found out that the case had been secretly settled and that the plaintiff and defense attorneys had lied to him, Judge Potter tried to amend the official outcome of the case from dismissed by the jury without prejudice to settled with prejudice. The judge s attorney stated, There was a payment of money to withhold evidence (Wolfe, 1995). Initially, an appeals court overruled Judge Potter on the grounds that too much time had elapsed before his attempt to change the verdict (Varchaver, 1995 Wolfe, 1995), but the judge won his appeal to the Supreme Court of Kentucky (Gibeaut, 1996). 

On May 23, 1996, the Supreme Court of Kentucky unanimously agreed in Potter v. Eli Lilly Co. that Judge Potter could proceed to hold a hearing on the secret settlement under an inherent-powers doctrine allowing courts to protect the integrity of their procedures (Gibeaut, 1996). The Supreme Court justices wrote, In this case, there was a serious lack 

Estimates of the secret setdement made by Eli Lilly and Company in the Wesbecker case have come through unrelated divorce suits. One plaintiff s attorney, presumably privy to the Eli Lilly settlement amount and involved in his client s divorce suit, stated, The amount boggles the mind (Gibeaut, 1996, p. 18). 

Not only was the Wesbecker case settled secretly during the trial, but the plaintiffs lead attorney Paul Smith decided to settle all of his several other cases against Eli Lilly at that time. Eli Lilly can no longer claim it has never settled a Prozac case. It has settled several of them involving different attorneys. 

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