Yesterday and today each featured an opinion from the Supreme Court. Both were unanimous.
Beavan v. Allergan U.S.A., Inc., ___ N.J. ___ (2026). This opinion by Justice Patterson today addressed whether plaintiffs’ differential diagnosis expert testimony in this products liability case satisfied the standards for admissibility. The Law Division, “[w]ithout conducting the gatekeeping inquiry” required by In re Accutane Litig., 234 N.J. 340 (2018), denied defendant’s motion to bar the testimony of plaintiffs’ two experts as unreliable under Evidence Rules 702 and 703 and/or as net opinions. The Law Division also denied defendant’s motion for summary judgment, relying in part on the expert opinions.
The Appellate Division granted defendant’s motion for leave to appeal. That court held plaintiffs’ expert testimony inadmissible and stated that the defense motion for summary judgment should have been granted. Justice Patterson observed, however, that the Appellate Division “acknowledged this Court’s adoption of the Daubert [v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993] factors in Accutane but did not remand the case for a determination pursuant to that decision.” Thus, neither court below had applied Accutane in its rulings.
That failure called for a reversal and remand to the Law Division to evaluate the expert testimony in accordance with Accutane. “We view Accutane to mandate that any dispute about the reliability of expert testimony in a civil case be resolved by the trial court, acting as gatekeeper and applying the factors set forth in that decision if it deems those factors relevant. Accutane, 234 N.J. at 347-48, 390-91. Consequently, we do not view the current record to provide an adequate basis for a determination whether the proposed expert testimony is sufficiently reliable under Accutane to be admitted at trial, and we conclude that a remand is necessary for the proceeding that this Court envisioned in Accutane.” The Court preserved “the parties’ right to seek summary judgment following the trial court’s evidentiary determinations on remand.”
The foregoing is the bottom-line summary of a 45-page opinion that contains much detail as to the testimony offered, the Accutane, Daubert, and net opinion standards, and numerous authorities from New Jersey and elsewhere. Anyone with an interest in product liability cases or expert testimony will find Justice Patterson’s opinion well worth reading in full.
State v. Patel, ___ N.J. ___ (2026). This appeal focused on the requirement that a party seeking a new trial based on newly discovered evidence show that '“the new evidence was discovered after trial and was ‘not discoverable by reasonable diligence beforehand.’ State v. Carter, 85 N.J. 300, 314 (1981). That is how Chief Justice Rabner framed the legal standard in his opinion for the Court.
Defendant was convicted of theft by deception. Eight days after the jury verdict, the Chief Justice said, defendant’s sister, “shocked” by the verdict, “first began to examine boxes of documents at their parents’ home ….[,] brought certain materials to defendant’s attention and, within an hour of searching his emails, defendant found allegedly relevant and authentic documents that he asserted exonerated him.
The Law Division granted defendant’s motion for a new trial based on the new evidence. The Appellate Division affirmed. The Supreme Court, however, reversed.
Chief Justice Rabner said that “it was undisputed that the documents in question were in defendant’s possession leading up to his trial. He also had reason to know they existed because he not only signed some of them but also emailed them to himself. And as an experienced businessperson, he understood that corporate agreements like the ones he found are commonly written down. Despite that, defendant never searched for the documents during the four years from his indictment to trial. Under those circumstances, he cannot establish that he acted with reasonable diligence.”
In support of that conclusion, reached despite the application of abuse of discretion review, the Chief Justice cited numerous cases from New Jersey and from federal and state appellate courts around the country. His encyclopedic opinion left no doubt that the Court’s result was correct.
It did not help defendant that there were “serious allegations of fraud related to defendant’s motion. The State contends that two documents defendant submitted after trial … [were] ‘highly questionable,” [and a] close examination of the documents tends to support that concern.” The Court proceeded to discuss some of the State’s contentions, but chose not to reach other arguments about the authenticity of the newly produced documents. The Chief Justice cautioned, however, that “[i]f a motion for post-conviction relief is filed in this case, the parties and the court should examine with care what may well be a fraud on the court.” The Court was careful to state that it did not “suggest that defense counsel engaged in improper behavior.”
