Depuy Hip Lawsuit Lawsuit and Settlement Status: January to March 2019
March 25, 2019
Author: Daniel Gala
The first part of 2019 saw a series of important developments in DePuy hip implant litigation, from a $120 million settlement over deceptive marketing claims to indications that DePuy had settled roughly 10,000 lawsuits over its metal-on-metal Pinnacle hip implants. Here’s a quick rundown.
Winding Down: DePuy Pinnacle Hip Implant MDL – Northern District of Texas (MDL 2244)
The first part of 2019 may have seen the beginning of the end for long-running multidistrict litigation (MDL) over DePuy Pinnacle hip implants. With Bloomberg already having reported in mid-December that Johnson & Johnson was willing to pay in the neighborhood of $400 million to resolve roughly 3,300 products liability lawsuits over Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implants, or about one-third of the MDL’s total cases, the rumor mill went into overdrive when the fifth bellwether trial ended abruptly in late January 2019.
By early February, Bloomberg was reporting that a deal had been reached to resolve all or nearly all of the MDL’s 10,000 cases, based on comments by one of the leading plaintiff attorneys in the complex litigation.
“The parties have reached an agreement that hopefully will resolve most, if not all of the litigation,” attorney Mark Lanier was quoted as saying, referring to the DePuy Pinnacle MDL.
Though details of the settlement, including the amount of any monetary payouts, have not been disclosed publicly, the Bloomberg report from December 2018 stated based on five sources with knowledge of the situation that J&J had agreed at the time to settle roughly 3,300 of the 10,000 Pinnacle MDL cases for an average of about $125,000 each, which would total over $400 million and still cover only one-third of the MDL’s member cases.
Using these figures as a baseline, a settlement covering all or almost all of the MDL’s 10,000 cases could easily total over $1 billion in payouts by DePuy and J&J.
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Winding Down: DePuy ASR Hip Implant MDL – Northern District of Ohio (MDL 2197)
According to Johnson & Johnson’s annual report filed with the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) on February 20, 2019, despite more than 10,000 claims involving the DePuy ASR XL Acetabular System and the DePuy ASR Hip Resurfacing System having been resolved to date, approximately 1,800 active lawsuits remained in the United States alone. Since late 2010, federal DePuy ASR hip claims in the US have been consolidated as multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of Ohio.
The vast majority of settled DePuy ASR hip claims have been resolved pursuant to a November 2013 settlement agreement and extensions agreed to in 2015 and 2017.
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Settled: DePuy Metal-On-Metal Pinnacle Hip Implant Deceptive Marketing Claims From 46 State Attorneys General
Also in the first quarter of 2019, Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiary DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc. agreed to a $120 million settlement with the attorneys general of 46 different states over allegations that the companies had made false claims when promoting their artificial hip implants.
J&J and DePuy stood accused, among other things, of promoting the five-year survival rate of DePuy hip implants as being over 90%, when studies by European health regulators found the five-year survival rate of the devices to be closer to 5%, according to Bloomberg.
Deceptive Marketing Claims Settlement Sources:
