Ali v. Sanofi US Services Inc

Background

Aysha Ali sued Sanofi-aventis U.S. LLC and Sanofi US Services Inc., which the opinion collectively calls “Sanofi.” She alleged that Taxotere, a chemotherapy treatment manufactured by Sanofi, caused permanent changes in her hair’s thickness and length. Her claims included strict products liability based on an alleged failure to warn, negligence, negligent misrepresentation, and fraud-related claims.

Ali began taking Taxotere on August 15, 2008, and stopped in October 2008. She saw some hair return within a few weeks, but later noticed that her hair’s length and thickness had not returned to its prior condition. She learned during a 2017 phone call with an attorney about a possible connection between Taxotere and permanent hair loss. She filed a lawsuit against the defendants on December 5, 2017, as part of multidistrict litigation.

Summary-judgment ruling

Summary judgment is a decision without a trial when there is no genuine dispute about a fact that could affect the outcome and the moving party is entitled to judgment under the law. The parties agreed that California law applied and that California’s two-year statute of limitations applied to Ali’s personal-injury claims.

The court held that the defendants met their initial burden of showing that Ali’s claims accrued more than two years before she filed suit. The court considered the injury date under the allegations in the master complaint, which defined permanent chemotherapy-induced hair loss as absent or incomplete hair regrowth six months after chemotherapy ended. That definition would place the injury by April 2009. Because the evidence had some uncertainty—including that some hair returned later—the court viewed the facts in Ali’s favor and assumed the latest possible injury date was October 2010, when she realized her hair remained noticeably less thick and long than before treatment. That date was still more than two years before her December 2017 lawsuit.

Exceptions to the limitations period

Ali argued that the discovery rule delayed the start of the limitations period until 2017 because she did not earlier learn of the connection between Taxotere and permanent hair loss. The court rejected that argument. It found that Ali knew her sister’s hair had not fully regrown after Taxotere, expected her own hair to regrow within one or two years, recognized by 2010 that her hair had not returned to its prior length and thickness, and had always attributed the hair loss to chemotherapy. Based on that testimony, the court concluded that every reasonable factfinder would find she was on notice by 2010—and certainly before 2015—that she had suffered lasting hair loss and should investigate whether the chemotherapy was a wrongful cause.

The court also found that Ali had not shown she was unable, despite reasonable diligence, to discover the factual basis for her claims earlier. The master complaint cited publicly available articles and medical publications, including materials from 2006 and 2010, that described a connection between Taxotere and permanent hair loss. The court treated the master complaint’s allegations as judicial admissions—formal statements in pleadings that bind the party who made them—and concluded that reasonable investigation could have uncovered the connection before 2017.

The court separately rejected Ali’s fraudulent-concealment argument. Under that doctrine, a plaintiff must show that defendants took active steps beyond the alleged underlying wrongdoing to mislead her and prevent a timely lawsuit. The court found that the concealment Ali identified was the same alleged failure to warn underlying her claims, not additional conduct that could toll, or pause, the limitations period. The court also found that Ali had constructive knowledge of facts supporting her claims before 2015 and had not shown diligence in investigating the cause of her hair loss.

Rule 56(d) request

Ali asked the court to continue the summary-judgment hearing until discovery ended. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56(d) allows a court to delay ruling or permit additional discovery when a nonmoving party identifies specific facts that further discovery could uncover and that are essential to opposing summary judgment.

The court denied the request. Ali had not filed the required affidavit and had not specifically identified what further discovery would reveal. The court also found that the proposed discovery could not change the limitations analysis because the ruling relied on Ali’s own allegations and deposition testimony. The court rejected her arguments that additional discovery about her fraud claims, the defendants’ defenses, alternative causation positions, or expert evidence could alter the conclusion that her claims were time-barred.

Disposition

Judge Corley granted the defendants’ motion for summary judgment and denied Ali’s motion for a Rule 56(d) continuance. Because the statute of limitations barred all of Ali’s claims, the court declined to address the defendants’ additional argument concerning fraud.