Big Pharma - good grazin'

What animal do you think of when Insider says: "lawyer"?

Wrong!

Think cows.

"This is really like cattle moving around a pasture, grazing on the greenest part of the grass," said Peter Bicks, a defense lawyer at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. "The greenest part of the pasture now appears to be, in the post-Vioxx era, drugs."

Lawsuits are keeping Big Pharma on the defensive at a time when the drug makers are trying to rebuild their image amid public anger over prescription drug prices and the fact that some companies did not disclose negative information from clinical trials during the 1990s.

Drugs now under attack include Seroquel, an antipsychotic medicine from AstraZeneca; Ortho-Evra, a birth-control patch from Johnson & Johnson; Prempro, a hormone therapy for women from Wyeth; and Fosamax, an osteoporosis medicine made by Merck.

Alex Berenson of the NYT has an incisive report on the trend in the International Herald Tribune.