Local Law Firms Home > Product Liability News > J&J Agrees to $600,000 in Product Liability Settlements

J&J Agrees to $600,000 in Product Liability Settlements for Hip Implants

Back in 2010, Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy division recalled 93,000 ASR hips that had been sold all over the world on the grounds that more than 12 percent of the hip implants failed within five years.

Apparently, the failed implants have turned into metal debris inside the body, causing tissue failure at the joints and unhealthy levels of metal ions in the blood. Patients implanted with these hips claim in their lawsuits that they are in pain and immobilized, afflicted with fractured bones and infections.

About 37,000 of these hip implants were sold in the U.S., and as a result, J&J is now facing 8,000 lawsuits over these implants. Around 6,000 of these lawsuits have been consolidated under the purview of a federal court judge in Toledo, Ohio where the case is now in the pre-trial phase.

The remaining 2,000 are being litigated separately in courts across many different states, including Nevada, California and Maryland. In the first settlement agreed to by J&J over this flood of lawsuits, the company is paying three plaintiffs in Nevada $200,000 each to settle the matter out of court before it goes to trial.

The three settlements were for cases filed by Annelise Rundle, Martha Bender and Katherine Guy in a state court in Las Vegas. These three cases had been consolidated and were about to be taken up for a hearing by the court on December 3, 2012. The three plaintiffs all had hip replacement surgery done by the same surgeon sometime within the last six years, and all three had to go back in to have the hip implant removed after suffering from adverse side-effects.
J&J faces similar hearings in Maryland in Jan 2013 and then the federal court trial a couple of months after that. The company has already spent $800 million on the recall and estimates show that they may be liable for up to $2 billion in product liability settlements.