Defective Medical Devices

What do you do when a medical device designed to help you causes serious harm? Although biotechnology industries are responsible for producing wonderful and lifesaving devices, some companies also manufacture devices that have troubling side effects. It happens far too often. With decades of experience behind them, The Sanders Firm offers legal representation for those injured by defective medical devices and for their loved ones.

Recently, one of the first lawsuits was filed over the power morcellator device used during hysterectomy but now known to spread certain types of cancers. Additionally, there are now over 1000 lawsuits concerning the Mirena IUD, while a record breaking 60,000 lawsuits have been filed over vaginal mesh devices.

You might hear about a defective or dangerous device through the following channels:

• A recall notification, as for some types of replacement knees, which can fail and leave a patient immobilized and in great pain
• FDA warnings, as in the case of vaginal mesh devices designed to treat urinary incontinence in women and other conditions, but which pose problems as serious as organ damage
• A study highlighting the dangers of such a device, as with many produced concerning metal-on-metal hip replacements, which have numerous potential side effects, including hip failure and metal poisoning
• Reports of a groundbreaking lawsuit or a growing number of lawsuits related to the device and its side effects.

At times, the news may reach your doctor first; in other cases, you may see information in the media. However it occurs, you begin to put the pieces together: something wasn’t right about the hip implant I received, or the birth control device I was prescribed.

A product liability lawyer at The Sanders Firm can advise you if any of the following hold true in your case:

• The medical device that injured you was defective in either manufacture or design.
• The testing process was inadequate. Many devices, especially knee and hip replacements, were cleared through a less strenuous FDA 510(k) clearance process that did not require stringent examination of the device’s safety.
• In some cases, a company may not have heeded warnings, or may even have hidden information, about the danger of one of their products.
• The marketing campaign or labeling associated with the product may be inadequate or misleading.
• The recall may have been handled in a questionable fashion.

If enough lawsuits are filed concerning a single defective medical device, the cases are often consolidated as part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL) in which all cases share a pretrial discovery process. The MDL is created in order to facilitate speedy trials and to encourage large scale settlements.

For instance, DePuy (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) is currently facing 12,000 lawsuits concerning its defective ASR hip replacement, many of which have been consolidated as part of an MDL in Ohio and Texas. According to some sources, the company has set aside $2.5 billion to settle some of these claims.

Stryker, meanwhile, has agreed to a $1.4 billion settlement over their own hip devices, including the Rejuvenate and ABG II implants.