King County v. Express Scripts, Inc., Express Scripts Administrators, LLC, Medco Health Solutions, Inc., Merck-Medco, ESI Mail Order Processing, Inc., ESI Mail Pharmacy Service, Inc., Express Scripts Pharmacy, Inc., Express Scripts Specialty Distribution Services, Inc., OptumInsight, Inc., OptumInsight Life Sciences, Inc., The Lewin Group, Inc., Ingenix Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., Ingenix, Inc., OptumRx, Inc., and Optum, Inc.

Summary

The United States District Court for the Western District of Washington granted King County’s motion to strike specified affirmative defenses asserted by Optum and ESI entities in the County’s opioid-related public nuisance action. The court struck defenses concerning offsets, indemnification, reservation of additional defenses, res judicata, collateral estoppel, and compensation for injuries to individual drug users. The court concluded that the defenses were immaterial, insufficiently pleaded, or legally unavailable on the record presented.

Holdings

1. Affirmative defenses asserting that the County's recovery must be reduced based on compensation received by individual drug users are immaterial because the County's public-nuisance claim is brought on the County's own behalf in its sovereign capacity, not on behalf of individual residents.
2. A reservation of the right to assert additional affirmative defenses is not itself an affirmative defense; additional defenses must be asserted through a properly filed motion to amend.
3. An affirmative defense is insufficient when its overbroad wording fails to give the plaintiff fair notice of the nature and grounds of the defense.
4. A res judicata or collateral-estoppel defense must identify the prior action on which it is based, and the defense fails where the identified actions do not involve the defendants, do not include the relevant plaintiff as a party, and do not establish the required privity.
5. An indemnification-based offset defense is insufficient when it does not specify the type of indemnification, how the offset would be calculated, or how the indemnification relates to the plaintiff's claim.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the defendants' affirmative defenses concerning compensation received by individual drug users were relevant to the County's public-nuisance claim.
2. Whether a purported reservation of the right to assert additional defenses based on future developments in related litigation is a proper affirmative defense.
3. Whether broadly worded defenses seeking reductions for funding or benefits received from non-County sources provided fair notice.
4. Whether the res judicata or collateral-estoppel defense was sufficiently pleaded and legally viable where the identified prior actions did not involve the defendants, did not include King County as a party in one action, and did not establish privity.
5. Whether an indemnification-based offset defense was sufficiently pleaded when it did not identify the type of indemnification, its calculation, or its relationship to the County's claim.

Disposition

other