$500 Million DePuy Pinnacle Jury Award Slashed in Texas

Fort Worth, TXAn effort by defendant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and its implant unit DePuy to have a $500 million DePuy Pinnacle jury award set aside has failed. US District Judge Ed Kinkeade in US District Court, Northern District of Texas refused to accept the defendant’s arguments that jurors were biased through hearing unfair and irrelevant evidence during the defective hip implant trial, and that a new trial was warranted.

And yet, J&J and DePuy may have caught an unintended break when Kinkeade reduced the size of the jury award significantly in light of Texas law pertaining to punitive damages.

In the two-month trial, which wrapped up this past March, a jury awarded plaintiffs roughly $360 million in punitive damages, together with $140 million in compensatory damages.

However, according to Reuters (7/6/16) Texas law caps, or limits punitive damages according to a specific formula. It was not identified in the report if the jury was aware of such a limitation at the time their verdict was handed down. Nonetheless, after applying the punitive cap formula, the original award of $500 million combined has been reduced to about $151 million.

It is not known if the plaintiffs have any designs on appealing the award reduction. However, J&J and DePuy have signaled that an appeal of the original verdict will be going forward, now that they have Judge Kinkeade’s decision pertaining to their request for a new trial.

While this matter isn’t over for the five plaintiffs (and three of their spouses) attached to the case, there is a plethora of other lawsuits to focus on: no fewer than 8,400. All cases allege design flaws that cause the metal-on-metal hip implants to shed minute particles of metal into surrounding tissue, fostering inflammation and in some cases, tissue death as well as the erosion of bone.

The release of toxic metal ions into the bloodstream has been found to lead to metal toxicity in the blood, a serious health hazard which alone has prompted the wholesale replacement of defective hip implants in order to resolve the toxicity issue.

Metal-on-metal implants have been a relatively recent development and an attempt by medical device manufacturers to produce implants that are hardier, more robust and better suited to the active lifestyles enjoyed by modern seniors and those individuals straddling middle age.

As the basic design of the implants changed little beyond the introduction of new materials (metal), most manufacturers were able to bring their products to market more quickly without the need for lengthy and expensive clinical trials.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employs a fast-track clearance known as the 510(k) designed for devices that are substantially similar to other devices already on the market.

The same year that DePuy put a halt on the selling of Pinnacle metal-on-metal hips, the manufacturer was required to shell out about $2.5 billion to settle more than 7,000 lawsuits over another metal-on-metal device. The DePuy ASR system was subject to a recall in 2010.

While J&J and DePuy have signaled their intent to appeal the most recent trial outcome and verdict, all eyes will be on a third Pinnacle bellwether trial involving multiple plaintiffs, due for September. The first bellwether trial favored J&J, clearing the manufacturer of any wrongdoing when it went to trial and wrapped in 2014. That trial involved a single plaintiff.