Posted 16 June 2014 - 04:41 PM
Today I spoke with a member of Knox Ricksen's legal team team that's dedicated to the cymbalta discontinuation syndrome issue.
We must ALL contact him, this is critical to their success. The more people they have, the greater the weight their actions on our behalf will have.
His name is Zachary Johnson, and he's in the firm's Oakland, CA office. I think, but did not confirm, that he's either a law clerk or a senior paralegal assigned to new client intake for this effort. His phone number is 877-713-5669.
He accepted my case, and is mailing me a new client packet, with a number of forms to be completed, this afternoon.
He was just wonderful with me on the phone. He, and the rest of the team, are fully aware of what this drug, trying to quit, does to us. He listed patiently to me try to summarize my own encounter with it, and all the difficulty I had remembering dates and details. He was empathetic and sympathetic, and came across as completely dedicated to our cause.
I did the best I could to jot down notes of what he told me:
The firm has taken this on as a personal crusade, because the wife of one of the partners had the hard withdrawal and they saw first hand what it did to here and how she suffered.
They are still actively seeking and accepting new clients.
They are fully aware of the lack of knowledge about withdrawal in the medical field....doctors,shrinks, therapists, pharmacist....and, even disability lawyers do not know about this and likely do not know how to plead this as part of SSDi applications.
In order to recruit more clients and to educate the medical and legal profession, they will start TV advertisements relatively soon. I forgot to ask if this would extend to print, radio and the internet.
For now, their plan is to handle each of us as a separate case, on behalf of us as individuals.
This will allow them to attempt to intervene in some ongoing damage settlement cases against Eli Lilly that are, I think, being handled by other firms.
Then, the next step of their plan is to bring all of our individual cases together into a class action.
They are doing it this way because trying to get us included in another case that has reached settlement talks, if it works, will bring faster results. Perhaps, if successful, this would mean we would receive payments for the damage we've suffered. I forgot to ask.
The class action will be a long and arduous process and effort. He's fully aware that Eli Lilly is not a "nice" company. But the firm is prepared to take them on big time.
Knox Ricksen's needs our help, each and every one of us needs to contact Zachary. NOW.
I'm going to start a new discussion topic with this information and include the link to this discussion that xman started.
I'm also going to contact the angel who started and administers this site and tell him about this and ask him to pin the topic to the top of the board, so it remains as visible as possible.
I feel immense relief, and yet am exhausted by all this. So, I'm going to see if I can take a nap. :-)