DePuy Hip Lawsuit Continues to Grow

More and more people are filing DePuy hip lawsuits in federal courts, and now at least 17 new plaintiffs hailing from Illinois and Tennessee have joined in.
Earlier this month, at least 5 individuals from the Chicago area who had all received faulty hip implants filed lawsuits against DePuy. They claim that the company, which is a subsidiary of corporate giant Johnson & Johnson, did not issue a recall of the defective device in a timely fashion. It was not until late in 2010 that the DePuy hip recall was announced.
In addition to the lawsuits from Chicago, according to The Tennesseean there are around 12 plaintiffs in Tennessee who have recently filed DePuy lawsuits at the U.S. District Court in Nashville. Much like lawsuits that are currently pending, these latest claims cite hip complications, including those serious enough to require revision surgery, as the reason for filing suit.

New DePuy Hip Lawsuits Included in Multidistrict Litigation

The lawyers for the new plaintiffs in Illinois and Tennessee insist that there was plenty of evidence that DePuy’s metal-on-metal ASR was allowing dangerous amounts of chromium and cobalt particles to enter the bloodstream of the more than 30,000 U.S. citizens who were implanted with the device. Despite this early knowledge, DePuy did not issue a recall until August 2010, which was already months—possibly years—after the problems with the implant were reported.
There are already more than 100 plaintiffs across the United States who have acquired a DePuy hip attorney and filed a lawsuit in a federal court. The new lawsuits recently filed in Nashville and Chicago are now part of a growing legion of DePuy victims. Legal experts following the lawsuit predict that more than 1,000 DePuy hip lawsuits could be underway before the first “bellwether” trials start to take place in late 2011 or early 2012.
U.S. District Judge David A. Katz was scheduled to meet with attorneys from both sides of the DePuy lawsuits to arrange leadership positions for MDL (multidistrict litigation). MDL is a legal process that takes place before the cases reach trial, and it serves to eliminate redundancies and save money while discerning the facts that are central to many individual lawsuits filed in districts across the country.
The Nashville and Chicago-area plaintiffs will join the plaintiffs whose lawsuits are already consolidated under multidistrict litigation, because these new lawsuits were also filed in federal courts. If an attorney files a lawsuit for a client in a state court, then he or she may choose to prevent that case from becoming part of the MDL.
More than 90,000 individuals worldwide have received a DePuy ASR implant since 2005. In 2010 the company admitted that their implant, which was designed to last 15 years or more, actually failed within 5 years for 1 out of 8 patients. The most recent study, however, found that the defective implant fails in half of all recipients within 6 years.