More than 350 plaintiffs have filed suits which have been combined in multidistrict litigation in the DePuy hip replacement cases. These cases will be dealt with on Ohio, where Judge David A. Katz is overseeing the pretrial proceedings. However, more cases have been filed in other courts. There are currently 220 DePuy lawsuits in California, and dozens in New Jersey where the parent company of DePuy, Johnson & Johnson, is located.
Attorneys are still unsure of how the litigation is going to proceed, since there are many cases being filed in different courts, and not all of them are being included in the multidistrict litigation. In addition, experts say, there could be thousands of cases in the DePuy multidistrict lawsuit by the time the first trial begins. This estimate is based on the fact that more than 37,000 people were fitted with the DePuy ASR hip replacement system in America alone, and studies have shown that the system fails in more than 12 percent of recipients within five years.
Another separately conducted study puts the failure rate as almost 50 percent over six years, a staggering statistic when it is taken into account that over 90,000 people worldwide have received this implant.
A motion has been filed with the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation which, if passed, would consolidate several DePuy lawsuits, including one of an older device that is similar to the ASR. The Pinnacle hip replacement system is said to have similar design defects of the ASR device. Many DePuy hip lawsuits allege that DePuy knew of potential problems before a recall of the product was issued.
Plaintiffs involved in multidistrict litigation should expect to receive a settlement relatively quickly. While it is true that the legal process is often long and arduous, multidistrict litigation helps to speed cases through the legal system by consolidating pretrial processes in order to expedite legal action.
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