Ted B. Wacker is a partner with the firm and has been a trial attorney involved in litigating cases for the past 15 years.  He specializes in pharmaceutical litigation and other serious personal injury matters. 

He received a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of San Diego School of Law in 1991, where he received American Jurisprudence Awards in Products Liability and Creditors' Remedies. During law school, he served as a judicial extern in the California Court of Appeal, Fourth Appellate District, Division One, for the Honorable Patricia Benke.

He currently supervises the firms mass tort litigation involving a number of pharmaceutical products recalled from the market including Vioxx, Bextra/Celebrex, Guidant, Medtronic, Medtronic Sprint Fidelis, ReNu, AMO, MRI - NSF and OrthoEvra. In addition, Mr. Wacker has litigated medical malpractice cases both on the defense side and as a plaintiff's attorney.  He recently settled a medical malpractice case involving the wrongful death of a 29 year old woman against Kaiser for over $1 million.

Mr. Wacker has been intimately involved in the Vioxx litigation on a national level following the removal of the drug on September 30, 2004 due to an increase risk of cardiovascular accidents.  He is currently a member of the Vioxx MDL Science and Expert Committee. In August 2006, Mr. Wacker was a member of the trial team in the Vioxx case of Barnett v. Merck, which resulted in a $51 million verdict against Merck.  In November 2007, Merck agreed to resolve all individual Vioxx cases for a global settlement amount of $4.85 Billion.

He has previously been a member of the Federal Multi-District Rezulin litigation Science and Expert Committee. In the Rezulin litigation, Mr. Wacker was lead plaintiff's counsel with respect to a number of critical scientific depositions of nationally-recognized defense experts including Mario Chojkier, M.D., Jeffrey Brent, Ph.D., Steven Caldwell, M.D. and Scott Friedman, M.D.  The California Coordinate Trial Court ruled against the defendant's 402 evidentiary motion seeking to exclude plaintiff's experts from testifying based, in part, upon the testimony obtained from these witnesses at deposition. Ultimately, the firm was able to resolve hundreds of Rezulin cases following this important evidentiary ruling for multi-million dollar settlements.   In addition, Mr. Wacker has previously served on the Science and Expert Committees of both Baycol and Zyprexa at the state and national-MDL levels. The firm has successfully resolved all Baycol and Zyprexa cases for multi-million dollars.

Mr. Wacker has lectured at various conferences in the area of pharmaceutical litigation including the following: ATLA Mid-Winter Conference in Maui, Hawaii, February 2003 entitled, "Rezulin: Proving the Silent Injury Case"; Mealy's Baycol Litigation Conference, Houston, Texas, January 2004; Harris Martin Drug Litigation Conference, Philadelphia, January 2005; Harris Martin Drug Litigation Conference, April 2005, in West Palm Beach, Florida and the CAOC annual convention in Los Angeles in 2006 and ATLA's Litigation at Sunrise in Hawaii in 2006.  In 2007, he also spoke with a panel of other trial attorneys at the Mealy's Vioxx litigation conference in Key Biscane, Florida.

He has written on various topics including a recent article entitled, "Baycol: Another ill-fated drug removed from the market by the FDA", Journal of the Consumer Attorney's Association for Southern California, Advocate, April/May 2002; Merck played Dodgeball' in Marketing Vioxx to Consumers, Journal of the Consumer Attorney's Association of Southern California, Advocate, September 2005; the Orange County Trial Lawyer's magazine, the Gavel, "Defeating a Kelly-Frye Challenge" in 2006.

Mr. Wacker is licensed to practice by the State Bar of California and the United States District Court for the Central and Southern Districts of California. He is a member of the American Bar Association, California Bar Association, American Trial Lawyer's Association, Consumer Attorney's of California, Orange County Bar Association and has been on the Board of Directors of the Orange County Trial Lawyer's Association for the past 3 years and most recently was the chair of the Top Gun awards committee representing the best trial attorney's in the community and made the recommendation to induct OCTLA's first past members into the OCTLA "Trial Lawyer's Hall of Fame."