What’s a chicken plucker, you ask? A lawyer who recognizes a client with a good case and knows how to proceed. (The chicken catcher is out there trolling for clients). And so about 100 chicken pluckers paid $695 each to meet in the Embassy Suites hotel in downtown Chicago last week to talk about strategies for suing Glaxo over Avandia. Here are a few remarks, courtesy of The Madison & St. Clair Record …

Vance Andrus of Lafayette, La., was the conference chairman: “People were ecstatic,” he told the crowd when recalling Vioxx. “They were counting their money. It was like the bar scene in Star Wars. I told them, curb your enthusiasm. They are not going to give this money away.” But he added that tens of thousands were seriously injured. “Isn’t this what you went to law school for?”

Defense attorneys were on hand, too. Nathan Schachtman of Philadelphia called Steve Nissen’s meta-analysis a “shmeta-analysis.” He wins quip of the day. “A pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not science,” he said. “….A splashy New England Journal of Medicine article means tenure, grants, promotions, a corner office and the like…Time, mature reflection, peer review and scientific judgment were abridged.”

Chief chicken plucker Mark Lanier of Houston: “The question is not whether Avandia was the cause,” he said. “The question is, was it a risk factor?”….

…He charged that Glaxo fully tested Avandia and spent money on sales reps instead of more safety studies. “How dare they say, where’s your study, when it needs to be their study?” he said. “They pick where they spend their money…They sat on risks 11 months before they gave it to FDA. The issue is corporate behavior…To me this is a holy war. This is a call.”