California DePuy ASR Hip Replacement Trial Settled

According to unnamed sources close to the negotiations, Johnson & Johnson has agreed to settle a DePuy ASR hip replacement lawsuit, on the eve of trial. This DePuy ASR case that was set to begin later in October in California state court. See my earlier reporting on secret settlement negotiations regarding the DePuy ASR implants. This is overall good news for plaintiffs that the company is beginning to take the allegations seriously.

Scope of the DePuy ASR Hip Implant Debacle

There are about 11,500 allegedly defective DePuy ASR hip implant product liability lawsuits filed nationwide. The DePuy ASR hip implant model was removed from the market in August 2010 amid great controversy, that a large number of patients were requiring revision surgery within a few years.

California DePuy ASR Plaintiff Allegations

Robert Ottman was scheduled for an early trial date in San Francisco Superior Court, he claimed to have experienced problems that resulted in the need for revision surgery.

Apparently the DePuy ASR lawsuit settled recently, and the Court has given the parties two months to file the necessary dismissal of the complaint. The settlement agreement remains confidential.

DePuy ASR Settlement Negotiations

Recently there has been speculation that Johnson & Johnson was considering an offer of more than $3 billion to settle DePuy ASR lawsuits, which would average out to about $300,000 per case.

Bellwether Trials and Verdicts

A series of early trial dates, known as bellwether trials, have been scheduled in state and federal courts throughout the country.

Earlier this year, a California jury awarded $8.3 million in damages in one case. A second trial held in Illinois state court resulted in a defense verdict for the hip implant manufacturer.

DePuy ASR Federal MDL

In the federal court system, all DePuy ASR lawsuits are consolidated for pretrial proceedings before U.S. District Judge Katz in the Northern District of Ohio.

The first federal DePuy ASR trial was set to begin in September. That case was delayed at twice in September and is now set to start in January 2014.

Following the early bellwether trials in the federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL), if Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy Orthopaedics subsidiary does not reach agreements to settle a large number of cases, thousand of individual lawsuits could be remanded back to U.S. District Courts where they were originally filed for separate trial dates.