On March 30, 2018, a federal jury in Arizona ordered C.R. Bard, Inc. to pay $3.6 million to a Georgia woman who suffered serious complications after the company's G2 inferior vena cava (IVC) filter fractured inside her body.
Currently, there are thousands of personal injury cases pending against Bard in the MDL and the first bellwether trial, Sherr-Una Booker v. C.R. Bard, Inc., et al., will soon be in the hands of an Arizona jury. Recently, District Judge David G. Campbell issued a ruling on Bard’s summary judgment motion that will define the issues for the second bellwether trial which is currently scheduled to begin on May 15, 2018.
On March 1, 2018, the Court ruled that evidence of the Bard Recovery IVC filter problems may be introduced during the first bellwether trial in multidistrict litigation 2641 (MDL 2641). The Court stated that it would be difficult to try the Booker case without evidence of the Recovery filter and the problems it encountered. Accordingly, Bard's motion to exclude the evidence was denied and reported problems with the Bard Recovery filter will be fair play in the Booker trial next week.
Hernia Mesh Litigation Moves Forward as MDL Court Establishes Pretrial Timeline and Bellwether Date for Ethicon Physiomesh. After years of battling transvaginal mesh lawsuits, Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Ethicon finds itself at the forefront of the expanding litigation over defective hernia mesh products.
The U.S. District Court in the Southern District of Indiana ordered remand for several Cook IVC filter cases that had been improperly removed to the multidistrict litigation (MDL 2570) from their respective state courts in South Dakota, Texas, and California.
The central question decided by District Judge Richard L. Young was whether medical malpractice claims against in-state implanting physicians should be severed from the product liability claims against the manufacturer.
With over 3,000 Bard IVC filter lawsuits pending in multidistrict litigation 02641 (MDL 2641) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, plaintiff and defense counsel are busily engaged in final pretrial motion practice on the eve of the first Bard IVC bellwether trial which is set to begin on March 13, 2018 (Sherr-Una Booker v. C.R. Bard, Inc., 16-CV-474).