Last week, one of Panish | Shea | Ravipudi LLP’s own clients gained a landmark victory when a jury decided that DePuy owed the man $8.3 million in compensatory damages. The jury concluded that the subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson failed to disclose the risks inherent with the DePuy ASR metal on metal hip implant, a device that failed and caused its recipient to go through extensive hardship.
On the heels of that case, the second lawsuit pertaining to the device has now gone to trial. An Illinois nurse and her lawyers claim that the defective design of the DePuy ASR caused her to experience a failure within three years after implantation and that the medical device company failed to notify her and others across the world of the dangers associated with the product. If those risks were made known, her lawyer says that a doctor could have made a better decision and refrained from implanting the device.
Despite all this, DePuy and Johnson & Johnson continue to insist that their device is not inherently defective. At trial, the lawyer for the company claimed that failures can be caused by the item not working correctly, a doctor not implanting the item properly, or an issue with the patient’s health. In this case, lawyers point to the latter to explain why the device failed.
Still, that doesn’t take into account DePuy’s own internal findings which show that a staggering 37% of devices are estimated to fail within five years. Concerns over the shedding of metal debris have also yet to be assuaged. 10,750 or so lawsuits still await trial.