U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus, presiding over all federal hernia mesh lawsuit issued a case management order on March 22, approving 12 cases selected by both parties to be part of bellwether discovery pool.
The court will shortlist six cases, following a preliminary discovery into case-specific facts, from which three representative claims will be selected as the first to go to trial in May, July, and September 2020. Each of the cases involved similar allegations that the polypropylene mesh, used in C.R. Bard's hernia mesh products, was unreasonably dangerous and posed a huge risk to patients who were forced to undergo additional corrective surgery to get the patch removed. The parties will next meet with the court on April 17, 2019, to review the status of the Bard hernia mesh claims.
There are more than 240 product liability cases pending against Bard over painful complications experienced by plaintiffs due to design defects in several polypropylene products sold by the company. As per a prediction made by plaintiff lawyers, there might be roughly 3,000 claims by the year-end in the federal multidistrict litigation (MDL No. 2846; In Re: Davol, Inc./C.R. Bard, Inc., Polypropylene Hernia Mesh Products Liability Litigation), which was formed in the Southern District of Ohio for coordinated pretrial proceedings.
