 "Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay $1 billion for faulty hip implants")
Johnson & Johnson was ordered by a Texas jury to pay more than $1 billion to patients who claimed the company hid flaws in its Pinnacle artificial hips that had to be surgically removed, in J&J’s second loss linked to the implants.
Officials of J&J’s DePuy unit, which makes the Pinnacle hips, knew the devices were defective but failed to properly warn doctors and patients about the risk they would fail, the federal jury in Dallas determined Thursday. J&J still faces almost 9,000 lawsuits accusing the company of mishandling the metal-on-metal hips. J&J stopped selling the devices in 2013 after the US Food and Drug Administration toughened artificial-hip regulations.
At $1.04 billion in actual and punitive damages, it’s the third largest jury award of 2016, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The largest, for $3 billion, came in June in a breach of contract case brought by Hewlett-Packard against Oracle.
“The jury is telling J&J that they better settle these cases soon,” Mark Lanier, who represented the group of six hip patients who sued J&J and DePuy. “All they are doing by trying more of these cases are driving up their costs and driving the company’s reputation into the mud.”
“The jury is telling J&J that they better settle these cases soon,” Mark Lanier, who represented the group of six hip patients who sued J&J and DePuy. “All they are doing by trying more of these cases are driving up their costs and driving the company’s reputation into the mud.”
J&J’s DePuy unit acted appropriately in designing and testing the product, spokeswoman Mindy Tinsley said in a statement.
The companies have strong grounds for appeal and remain committed to the long-term defense of the lawsuit allegations, according to the statement.
Lawyers for J&J said US District Judge Ed Kinkeade’s rulings barred J&J from providing “a fair presentation to the jury.” “Now the appellate court will need to review errors” made by the judge, John Beisner, one of J&J’s attorneys, said in an e-mailed statement.
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The company will ask Kinkeade not to schedule any more trials until the appellate review is completed, he said.
The verdict continues a losing stretch for J&J before US juries this year. Six of the seven largest product-defect verdicts in the US this year have been against J&J units, including three in lawsuits claiming its talc products cause ovarian cancer.
J&J won the first Pinnacle hip case to go to trial in October 2014 after a jury rejected a Montana woman’s claims that the devices were defective and gave her metal poisoning. In March, a Dallas jury ordered J&J 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.
The Pinnacle devices weren’t covered by New Brunswick, New Jersey-based J&J’s $2.5 billion settlement covering its ASR line of artificial hips. In 2010 J&J recalled 93,000 of those implants worldwide, saying 12 per cent failed within five years.
The company still faces 8,900 suits over Pinnacle hip failures, according to a May filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. That figure is up from 8,300 suits the company listed in an October 2015 regulatory filing.
The Pinnacle cases have been consolidated before Kinkeade, who agreed to combine the six cases in the most recent trial. California residents Marvin Andrews, Kathleen Davis, Rosa Metzler, Judith Rodriguez, Lisa Standerfer and Michael Weiser each had Pinnacle hips removed after they failed, according to court filings.
The group alleged their DePuy hips leached cobalt and chromium material into their bloodstreams, leading to the device failures and surgical removal. They claimed J&J officials knew their metal-on-metal design would cause such injuries but pushed ahead with the product to rack up billions of dollars in sales.
The plaintiffs also contend DePuy officials rushed the Pinnacle hips to market with little testing and turned a blind eye to studies that showed metal-on-metal prosthetics posed a deterioration risk for human tissue and bone.
The consolidated case is In Re DePuy Orthopaedics. Pinnacle Hip Implant Products Liability litigation, 11-md-2244, US District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Dallas). The lead case in this trial was Andrews v DePuy Orthopedics, No. 15-cv-03484-K, US District Court for the Northern District of Texas (Dallas).