Ms. Relkin, whose practice focuses on medical device and pharmaceutical product liability, as well as toxic tort matters, has represented thousands of plaintiffs injured by defective medical products with a recent focus on the generation of failed metal-on-metal and modular hip implants.
She serves in leadership capacities appointed by courts as the Co-Lead Counsel of the In Re: DePuy ASR Multi-District Litigation (MDL) and the Lead and Liaison Counsel for the New Jersey In Re: Stryker Rejuvenate & ABG II Modular Hip Implant Litigation as well as a member of the Plaintiff Steering Committee in the In Re: Xarelto Product Liability Litigation and the Executive Committee of In Re: Invokana (Canagliflozin) Products Liability Litigation.
She had served on the court-appointed Executive Committee of the MDL involving the birth control patch Ortho Evra, and as the Plaintiffs' Liaison counsel in the New Jersey consolidated litigation involving the oral contraceptives Yaz, Yasmin and Ocella, as well as on the Court Appointed Plainitffs' Steering Committee of the In Re: Biomet Hip Implant Litigation.
In April 2006, she was part of the trial team that secured a $13.5 million verdict in McDarby v. Merckin a failure-to-warn case involving the medication Vioxx and the risk for heart attack, and she successfully defended the compensatory damage verdict on appeal.
Ms. Relkin, who is Certified by the New Jersey Supreme Court as a Civil Trial Attorney, is an elected member of the American Law Institute as well as the Summit Council. She is an active member of the American Association for Justice (past chair of its Toxic, Environmental, and Pharmaceutical Torts section); the New Jersey Trial Lawyers Association, where she serves on the Board of Governors; the New Jersey and New York Bar Associations and the American Bar Association, where she was co-chair of the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Subcommittee of the ABA Section of Litigation Mass Torts Committee. She is also President of the Roscoe Pound Civil Justice Institute and serves on the Board of Visitors of the University of California at Irvine. She is a frequent lecturer nationally at continuing legal education programs.
She has published law review articles in the Cardozo Law Review and the Dickinson Journal of Environmental Law and Policy, the Chapter on Failure to Warn in Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Mass Tort Litigation in the treatise New Jersey Mass Torts and Class Action (2015) published by the New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education and numerous other legal publications. In addition, Ms. Relkin serves on the board of advisors for the BNA Product Safety and Liability Reporter, The Toxics Law Reporter, and the MDEX Daubert Reporter.
She has been consistently named as a “Super Lawyer” in both New York and New Jersey for the past several years and has been AV rated by Martindale Hubble for more than two decades.
Her litigation areas include: metal-on-metal and modular hips including Stryker Rejuvenate and AGB II modular stems, the Stryker Accolade, Citation and Meridian stems, DePuy ASR and Pinnacle, Wright Conserve metal-on-metal hips, and the Wright ProFemur modular hip. She also represents women injured by the medications Xarelto, Invokana, as well as women who had Power Morcellators used during laparoscopic hysterectomies.