Source: http://fida-advocate.blogspot.com/2017/11/ends-11142017-j-depuy-pinnacle-ultamet.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 22:37:54+00:00

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Johnson & Johnson was ordered Thursday by a Dallas jury to pay $247 million to half a dozen patients who claimed the company hid defects in its Pinnacle artificial hips, its third big-dollar loss over the products.
Officials of the company's DePuy unit, which makes the hips, knew the devices were defective but failed to properly warn doctors and patients about the risk that they would prematurely fail, the jury ruled. The panel awarded a total of $79 million in actual damages and $168 million in punitive damages to a group of six New York residents whose hips had to be surgically removed.
The number of lawsuits accusing J&J and DePuy of mishandling the metal-on-metal hips has grown by more than 13 percent over the past year, to 9,900, according to a regulatory filing. J&J stopped selling the devices in 2013 after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration toughened artificial-hip regulations.
"These companies' behaviors were so reprehensive that it demands repeated punishment," Mark Lanier, a lawyer for the hip recipients, said after the verdict. Lanier won the previous two verdicts against J&J and DePuy.
J&J officials said Thursday in an emailed statement they acted "appropriately and responsibly" in the development and marketing of the Pinnacle hips. "We will immediately begin the appeal process and remain committed to the long-term defense of the allegations in these lawsuits,'' Stella Meirelles, a spokeswoman for DePuy, said in the release.
Johnson & Johnson won the first Pinnacle hip case to go to trial in October 2014 after a federal court jury in Dallas rejected a Montana woman's claims that the devices were defective and gave her metal poisoning.
Another Dallas jury ordered J&J last year to pay $502 million to a group of five patients who accused the company of hiding defects in the hips. A judge cut that verdict in July to about $150 million.
Earlier this year, a third Dallas jury ordered J&J and DePuy to pay more than $1 billion to six California residents whose hips had to be removed after failing. That award was later slashed by nearly half.
The Pinnacle devices weren't covered by New Brunswick, N.J.-based J&J's $2.5 billion settlement of claims over its ASR line of artificial hips. J&J recalled 93,000 of those implants worldwide in August 2010, saying 12 percent failed within five years.
The Pinnacle cases have been consolidated before U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in Dallas for pretrial information exchanges and test trials. Kinkeade agreed to combine the six cases in the most recent trial.
The six New York plaintiffs in the current case are Uriel Brazel, an 88-year-old physician; Karen Kirschner, a 67-year-old elementary school teacher; Ramon Alicea, 61, a chauffeur; Hazel Miura, 60, a housing official; Eugene Stevens, 53, a health-care aide; and Michael Stevens, 52, a financial analyst.
The hip recipients argued DePuy officials rushed the Pinnacle hips to market with little testing and misled doctors about the device's safety profile, assuring them there was little risk of metal poisoning and tissue damage from the metal-on-metal product.
"They ran a grand seduction,'' Lanier, the group's lead lawyer, told jurors in closing arguments Nov. 14 "Surgeons were seduced into using metal-on-metal'' by DePuy executives' false assurances the company had "solved the metal-on-metal problem,'' the plaintiffs' lawyer added.
J&J's lawyers countered that the devices failed because of routine wear-and-tear rather than a flawed design and the company properly marketed the product.
In their ruling, jurors found J&J DePuy relied on "intentional misrepresentations" about the hips' safety profile to bolster sales and engaged in "deceptive business practices" in their marketing of the devices, according to a verdict form.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal jury in Dallas on Thursday ordered Johnson & Johnson and its DePuy Orthopaedics unit to pay $247 million to six patients who said they were injured by defective Pinnacle hip implants.
The jury found that the metal-on-metal hip implants were defectively designed and that the companies failed to warn consumers about the risks.
Six New York residents implanted with the hip devices said they experienced tissue death, bone erosion and other injuries they claimed were caused by the implants’ design flaws.
Law360, Dallas (November 16, 2017, 12:34 PM EST) -- A Texas federal jury on Thursday hit Johnson & Johnson and its DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. unit with a combined $247 million verdict in a bellwether trial over DePuy’s Pinnacle line of metal-on-metal hip implants, delivering the third consecutive nine-figure verdict in the multidistrict litigation.
million in punitive damages against DePuy.
For the six individual plaintiffs, each of whom is from New York, the jury awarded more than $77 million in past and future medical expenses and pain and suffering, including each plaintiffs’ actual past medical expenses, the amounts of which were stipulated to by the parties. Four of the plaintiffs’ spouses were awarded loss of consortium damages totaling $1.7 million.
"I'm stunned the amount was that high," Mark Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said after the verdict. "I'm overjoyed for the clients."
Lanier said the verdict is notable because U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade excluded from evidence a number of inflammatory documents and emails that J&J has said shouldn't have been admitted in previous bellwether trials, and the jury still awarded nearly a quarter-billion dollars in damages.
“He kept out every piece of reprehensible evidence that he could, and I was scared to death we’d walk away with nothing," Lanier said.
Lanier said he looks forward to taking the full record of the case to the Fifth Circuit and believes the win would be upheld.
Yet J&J's lawyers said an August 31 ruling from a Fifth Circuit panel renders the verdict a "phyrric victory" for the plaintiffs. In that decision, a majority of the panel said Judge Kinkeade reached a “patently erroneous” result and clearly abused his discretion by holding J&J and DePuy had waived their right to object to his court in Texas conducting trials for plaintiffs from other states.
The verdict followed a two-month trial, the fourth bellwether in multidistrict litigation that includes more than 9,000 cases alleging design defects in DePuy’s Pinnacle Ultamet line of metal-on-metal hip implants. In 2016, Texas juries found in favor of two groups of plaintiffs from Texas and California, awarding them $502 million and more than $1 billion in damages, respectively, though those verdicts were later reduced to $150 million and $543 million. In the first bellwether trial involving the Pinnacle Ultamet, a jury sided with J&J against a sole plaintiff from Montana.
The jury specifically found J&J and DePuy liable for design defect, negligent design, inadequate warning, manufacturing defect, negligent manufacture, negligent misrepresentation, intentional misrepresentation to the surgeons who performed the initial hip implant surgeries on the plaintiffs, fraudulent concealment from the plaintiffs and from the surgeons and deceptive business practices as to the plaintiffs and the surgeons. The jury also found J&J liable for negligent undertaking of a duty to provide services to DePuy and for aiding and abetting DePuy in its tortious conduct. The jury did not find J&J or DePuy liable for intentional misrepresentation to the plaintiffs.
A spokeswoman for DePuy, Stela Meirelles, said in a statement that the company acted appropriate and responsibly in developing the metal-on-metal hip implant.
During the trial, the six plaintiffs told jurors they’d suffered a range of injuries, including severe tissue damage that caused permanent muscle loss, intense pain, loss of hip movement and walking with a permanent limp. They say the Pinnacle product shed microscopic metal ions into their bodies, causing side effects that J&J and DePuy didn’t warn surgeons about and that could have been avoided with a safer design.
In his closing statement, plaintiffs' counsel Mark Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm asked the jury to punish J&J "for being indifferent to our health” through a large punitive damages award that would capture the attention of company executives who didn’t attend the trial.
J&J and DePuy made the case during the trial that metal-on-metal was a viable, reasonable option for hip implants and that its Pinnacle Ultamet product was offered to help doctors choose the device that best fit their patients. The companies said the metal-on-metal implant was developed to solve a bone degradation problem with an existing polyethylene hip implant on the market and denied putting profits above patient safety and long-term results.
In a closing statement, defense counsel Steve Quattlebaum of Quattlebaum Grooms & Tull PLLC said the plaintiffs had made an emotional appeal and told a good story but that their allegations were not backed up by evidence or science. Quattlebaum said there’s no evidence the surgeons who treated the six plaintiffs relied on or even saw the 99 percent statistic when choosing which kind of implant to use and said there’s no evidence the plaintiffs’ injuries were caused by the product specifications the plaintiffs had complained about during the trial.
The defendants are represented by John H. Beisner, Stephen J. Harburg and Jessica Davidson Miller of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, Steven W. Quattlebaum of Quattlebaum Grooms & Tull PLLC and Tracie J. Renfroe of King & Spalding LLP.
The consolidated cases are Alicea et al. v. DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. et al., case number 3:15-cv-03489; Barzel v. DePuy et al., case number 3:16-cv-01245; Kirschner v. DePuy et al., case number 3:16-cv-01526; Miura v. DePuy et al., case number 3:13-cv-04119; Stevens v. DePuy et al., case number 3:14-cv-01776; and Stevens v. DePuy et al., case number 3:14-cv-02341, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Update: This story has been updated with comment from representatives for the parties.
Frances Scott discusses one significant day in the jury trial that ends tomorrow.
I will post the verdict here. The closing arguments are happening tomorrow and the charges have already been read to the jury.
With another potentially $1 billion verdict on the line, two heavyweight lawyers—plaintiffs' counsel W. Mark Lanier and defense lawyer John Beisner—are trading ever-escalating accusations and barbs in court papers in a high-stakes DePuy hip implant trial.
With another potentially $1 billion verdict on the line, two heavyweight lawyers—plaintiffs’ counsel W. Mark Lanier and defense lawyer John Beisner—are trading ever-escalating accusations and barbs in court papers in a high-stakes DePuy hip implant trial.
To be sure, it’s no surprise that lawyers in the fourth bellwether trial over Pinnacle hip implants are fighting tooth and nail. Two previous trials landed $502 million and $1.04 billion verdicts. And as in those trials, Johnson & Johnson faces consolidated claims made by multiple plaintiffs at the same time—six New York plaintiffs to be exact.
It’s also not the first time that Lanier and Beisner have traded barbs in the litigation, which involves more than 9,000 cases. Earlier this year, Beisner, of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Washington, D.C., accused Lanier, of The Lanier Law Firm in Houston, of failing to disclose payments he made to two expert witnesses in the second bellwether trial.
But the accusations in the latest trial, which began on Sept. 19 in Dallas, have been excessively contentious. In the latest spat, Lanier raised questions about potential tampering with one of his witnesses—a revelation that U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade of the Northern District of Texas on Monday said could end up involving federal prosecutors and the FBI.
Lawyers on both sides already have slung more than a dozen motions and trial briefs at one another. Neither Lanier nor Beisner responded to calls seeking comment on this story.
Trial briefs filed on Sept. 21 and Oct. 3 accuse Johnson & Johnson’s lawyers of improper conduct – in particular, telling the jury about the worldwide popularity of Pinnacle hip implants knowing that plaintiffs’ attorneys were barred from bringing up previous deferred prosecution agreements involving bribes to foreign government officials and payments to doctors. Johnson & Johnson’s lawyers, in a Sept. 26 response, accused plaintiffs’ attorneys of mischaracterizing those agreements.
At a hearing on Monday, Kinkeade heard arguments about the statements of doctor that a DePuy sales representative told him “there could be ramifications” for his medical practice in connection with his upcoming testimony for the plaintiff. “He said the lawyers were ‘on him like crazy,’” according to an Oct. 15 affidavit filed by Dr. David Shein. Kinkeade called the developments “certainly disturbing and disconcerting to me.” He said he wanted the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI to interview the sale rep and any lawyers who contacted him.
An Oct. 11 motion for mistrial based on Lanier’s references during witness questioning to prior cases involving DePuy hip implants. The motion notes that Lanier has done this before. “As demonstrated by the last MDL trial—where similar improper questioning and testimony culminated in gargantuan verdicts—improper references to ‘hundreds of other lawsuits’ are uniquely prejudicial because they tend to inflate any damages award.” The motion claims Lanier’s references violate a motion in limine order and, although some of the defense’s objections were sustained, “the horse was already out of the barn and the damage had been done.” On Oct. 15, Lanier denied any violations of court orders and insisted that the references are necessary to show witness bias and establish claims for punitive damages.
An Oct. 15 motion for a jury instruction on the duty to warn to “correct plaintiffs’ counsel’s misrepresentation.” Specifically, the motion accuses Lanier of “insinuating to the jury several times” that Johnson & Johnson had a duty to warn patients when, under New York law, that duty was to surgeons.
An Oct. 15 motion for a jury instruction to “disregard plaintiffs’ counsel’s misleading questioning” of a defense witness regarding assets he held in a nonprofit foundation. Plaintiffs’ attorneys, in an Oct. 17 response, insist that an instruction isn’t necessary.
A Sept. 19 motion to reconsider consolidation of the six plaintiffs into a single trial. The motion is sealed, but Johnson & Johnson has repeatedly fought consolidated trials as leading to larger verdicts and prejudicing defendants. In an Oct. 10 response, plaintiffs’ attorneys called consolidated trials “standard operating procedure” in mass torts.
In addition to Beisner, Johnson & Johnson’s team on the court papers includes Skadden’s Stephen Harburg, another Washington partner; Steven Quattlebaum of Quattlebaum, Grooms & Tull in Little Rock, Arkansas; and Tracie Renfroe, a Houston partner at King & Spalding.
On the plaintiffs’ team, Lanier is joined by Wayne Fisher of Fisher, Boyd, Johnson & Huguenard in Houston; Richard Arsenault of Neblett, Beard & Arsenault in Alexandria, Louisiana; and Jayne Conroy of Simmons Hanly Conroy in New York.
Amanda Bronstad is the ALM staff reporter covering class actions and mass torts nationwide. She is based in Los Angeles.

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