Mike's guest posting regarding a lawsuit against the manufacturer of Ambien has received a comment from Susan Chana Lask, the attorney who filed the class-action suit on behalf of the plaintiffs.

While I am unable to verify that the note is from Ms. Lask, I believe the note is geniune. The link provided does go to Ms. Lask's web site. Her note is available as a comment on the original post but I will post it as a separate item to make sure more people read it.

If she is true to her word, Ms. Lask leaves some hope that class-action lawyers may not all bad....although I will never fully give them the benefit of the doubt.

[Follow-up: For what it's worth, one of my regular readers posted this comment noting that the language and self-described behavior of Ms. Lask is quite atypical of attorneys...making him wonder if the writer is really an attorney (or at least if she is a good one.)]

[Follow-up 2: Ms. Lask responded to KipEsquire's comment....see this posting's comments]

----------------

Author: Susan Chana Lask, Esq.
Url: http://www.appellate-brief.com
Comment:

Hi, my name is Susan Chana Lask, Esq. I read your article about Ambien and your comments about the lawsuit. I agree with you that there are cases that are out there just for the money; however, that is not the case with this lawsuit. Primarily, and as I and the class members maintained and made public, this is not at all about costing a drug company millions nor to put them out of business but is primarily about getting the proper warning out there to the public. I also agree with you that anyone that takes medication irresponsibly should be accountable for it and I am not represneting, to the best of my knowledge and investigation, anyone that did not take the medication as prescribed. That would not be fair. Finally, I agree with you whole heartedly that the particular law firm that immediately advertised itself as "If you or a loved one has overdosed or if a loved one has died while taking Ambien" you may have a case." is not the type of message we want to be associated with. I found that advertisement undignified.

As for the manufactuer of Ambien, it is not to be ignored that there may be good things about Ambien and it certainly may be useful for many people; however, there is much evidence that sleep walking and sleep eating does occur. Sanofi concedes that a small percentage of persons suffer those side effects. My mission after investigating the hundreds of claims was to mitigate the damage to those who had no idea that Ambien was connected to sleep walking and to inform the public, not at all to cost anyone anything more than that.

I believe this will resolve without consequence to the manufacturer and will benefit all once the warnings are in place; then patients and their doctors can not complain ever again in the future that they did not know what was happening to them and this quick resolution certainly will not hurt the market but will in my view help all involved.

Thank you for your time in reading this, and please feel free to post this anywhere you want as I think the message is important that we need to resolve problems without thinking it takes millions in unnecessary expense to do so. Susan Chana Lask, Esq.