product liability

Representing Yourself in a Product Liability Case: Where Do You Start?

Published on: May 16, 2017 | By Clay Hodges

Here’s a scenario: you had hip replacement surgery several years ago. In 2015 the hip began to hurt and cause other problems. You had revision surgery in 2016. While at home one afternoon recovering from the revision surgery, you see seventeen commercials from personal injury law firms asking if you recently had revision surgery following the failure of the [fill in the brand name] artificial hip. If so, lawyers are standing by to assist you with your case.

(At this point, if relevant to your situation please substitute “IVC filter” or “hernia mesh” or “artificial knee” or any number of risky prescription drugs in the scenario above for “artificial hip.”)

So your next thought may be: I should represent myself. This is known as being a pro se litigant. If that is your thought, your next question should be, “what steps should I take to make sure I get a full and fair settlement for my product liability case?” It’s a great question.

Handling Your Product Liability Case Without a Lawyer: Good Idea?

Published on: January 20, 2017 | By Clay Hodges

Now and then I get calls from people who are representing themselves in product liability litigation. (An individual who represents himself in litigation is called a pro se litigant.) Usually these callers have worked their cases to a point and have questions. Sometimes the questions are rather modest: “I’ve been offered this amount of money to settle? Is that fair?” Other times the questions are ominous: “The judge now says I need an expert witness. What is an expert witness?” The first question is a mere judgment call. Is $150,000.00 enough to compensate you for the pain and suffering of a failed artificial hip? That is mostly for the injured person to decide (though lawyers have plenty of insight into the value of such a claim). The second question poses a serious threat to your case. If an expert witness is required to prove your case, and you don’t have an expert witness (or worse, you don’t even know what an expert witness is) your lawsuit will be lost. And quickly. (You can read about expert witnesses here.)

I get the impulse to “do it yourself.” Prior to attending law school, I sued my landlord in small claims court for the return of my security deposit (I won). I also tried to replace the steering box in my 1974 Ford Bronco (that didn’t turn out so well).

These phone calls from pro se litigants are often interesting. Plainly some people have developed a distrust of lawyers. For others, the thought of paying legal fees for a good attorney seems unpleasant and undesirable, even overwhelming. Some may be trying to litigate their claim “on the cheap.” But the real question is: does it work? Can a person represent himself or herself successfully in a product liability injury case?

Smoking Can Harm Your Product Liability or Personal Injury Case

Published on: December 21, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

First, let me make the case for smoking:

You enjoy it. It tastes good (I guess). It makes you alert (I hear); but also, oddly, it can calm you as well (from what I’ve read). You also look cool doing it (I confess; this last part is often true). And it’s legal. But perhaps the strongest argument I hear from smokers is this: no one is going to tell me I can’t smoke. This is a free country after all.

That’s about it, really. That’s all I’ve got. And I’m not here to nag you. By all means, smoke if you must. But let me present a different perspective: setting aside the many health problems smoking causes, it can also destroy or damage your product liability or personal injury case.

Product Liability Law: Litigation, Settlement, and Wellness

Published on: December 12, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

I will publish a new book this week: Product Liability Law: Litigation, Settlement, and Wellness.

The book offers concise chapters on issues you need to be aware of when you first discover that a medical device may have failed in your body, or when a prescription medication is beginning to cause dreadful side effects. Beyond that, I discuss issues that arise when you are involved in product liability litigation, as well as concerns about money: before a product liability lawsuit is filed, during product litigation, and after a product lawsuit is resolved.

If you would like a free copy of Product Liability Law, I ask that you subscribe to the website. It takes twenty seconds to sign up. You will receive a copy of Product Liability Law, and you will receive emails only when I post new articles to the site. Two emails a week, tops.

The Expert Witness: The Linchpin of Your Product Liability Case

Published on: November 16, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

Let’s say you are a woman in your forties, and the mother of three children. After the birth of your third child you began to suffer from pelvic organ prolapse. This condition occurs when an organ like the bladder drops from its normal position and presses against the walls of the vagina. You go to your gynecologist, who recommends implantation of transvaginal mesh (TVM), the net-like plastic product that was marketed and sold as a solution to the problem of pelvic organ prolapse. You have the surgery. Soon you begin to suffer new and different pain and new health problems. You undergo three revision surgeries to remove all the pieces of the mesh. But after the revision surgeries you still suffer from pain and incontinence. You call an attorney, who files a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the TVM product. A few months into the litigation, your attorney explains that you now need an expert witness.

Your attorney is absolutely correct: you will need an expert witness in virtually all product liability cases. And a good one. And fast. If you do not have a qualified expert witness who can make the connection between your injuries and the failed product, then in the eyes of the court you do not have a case.

Your Most Important Witness

Expert witnesses are critical members of the team that is built to win your product liability case. In fact, other than your choice of attorney, the selection of the expert witness will be the most important decision you will make to help you win your case.

Expert witnesses are common in all kinds of litigation. In a simple car crash case, a treating doctor is almost always called to testify about the nature of the plaintiff’s injuries after the crash. In some car crash cases, a second expert witness will be called to explain why a car’s brakes failed, or why the car’s airbag did not deploy. Usually this testimony ends by showing causation, “and if the brakes did not fail, the driver would not have crashed into that oak tree and broken his arm.”

In a product liability case, the expert must be able to show causation, to make the connection between the failure of the product and the injuries the person suffered. If the injured person cannot show this causation through the testimony of a qualified expert witness, she cannot win her case. In the example at the top of this post, the expert will have to be able to testify that the new pains and the new health problems were medically caused by the failure of the mesh and the need for multiple revision surgeries.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

How Long Will It Take to Resolve My Artificial Hip Lawsuit?

Published on: November 8, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

I got a desperate phone call the other day. The call came from a man several states away. Let’s call him “Bill.” Bill had hip replacement surgery in 2007. The Depuy ASR artificial hip was implanted. He began to suffer pain eighteen months later, in early 2009, and blood tests showed his cobalt and chromium metal levels were rising at an alarming rate. He was suffering from metallosis. In 2011 Bill underwent Revision Surgery to remove the Depuy ASR hip. A year later he hired an attorney and filed his product liability lawsuit against Depuy Orthopaedics and Johnson & Johnson (the parent company of Depuy) in federal court in Bill’s home state. From there, the case was transferred to the Depuy ASR MDL in the Northern District of Ohio, before Judge David Katz. Judge Katz was the federal judge assigned to handle or manage the pretrial issues associated with the thousands of Depuy ASR cases that were transferred to his court after being filed across the country.

In November 2013, the first Settlement was reached between the Plaintiffs’ Committee and the Defense Team for Depuy and J&J. I have written about this Settlement and its terms here. So six years after the Original Surgery, and four years after the first onset of pain, and two years after Revision Surgery, Bill finally had the opportunity to accept the settlement offer or reject the offer and pursue a jury trial on his specific case. After much deliberation, Bill rejected the settlement offer.

Three years have now passed. Bill’s case is not on a trial calendar. In fact, as far as I am aware no case has yet been tried of any person who rejected the settlement offers. To make matters worse, this summer Judge Katz, in charge of the MDL, passed away. A new judge had to be appointed to take his place overseeing the MDL.

Bill is at his wit’s end. He told me he merely wants his day in court. He is now nine years removed from the Original Surgery, seven years removed from the onset of symptoms, five years from Revision Surgery, and over four years from filing suit. And still no trial date in sight.

Bill is not alone. Hundreds of people in the MDL rejected the settlement. And those people are waiting too.

So how long does it take to resolve your artificial hip case?

Don’t Choose Product Liability Lawyer Based on a “Free Consultation”

Published on: November 3, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

I see this on many lawyers’ websites or print advertisements: Free Consultation! It sounds great. Something is free! It’s a free con-sul-TA-tion, from an actual lawyer (although this last part is often not true; instead you likely get an “intake specialist,” a person gently trained to take down your story and type it up, usually for a paralegal to read). The “free consultation” is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The Free Consultation Has Very Limited Value

Let’s start with the hourly-rate case. If the legal representation will ultimately be subject to an hourly fee payment arrangement, this “free consultation” will not likely save you much or any money. First, some lawyers allow thirty minutes “free” and then announce, “if we go further I’ll need to charge you my hourly rate.” But even if the attorney sits patiently and listens carefully to you explain your case for forty-five minutes or an hour, it is unlikely the attorney will be able to give you sound legal advice at that point. Quite simply, a legal dispute is complex (otherwise you could have handled it yourself). Even a basic breach of contract action will usually have two conflicting stories, and behind those stories will sit documents: agreements, letters, invoices, emails, texts, witness statements, all of which must be reviewed carefully and analyzed. So a one-hour consultation usually gives the attorney a surface understanding of your issues. Imagine if a doctor offered a “free consultation,” and after a twenty-minute visit announced, “I understand completely. We must perform surgery and remove one part of your lung.” It doesn’t work that way. Instead, the doctor listens to your story (and charges an office visit fee), then orders the appropriate tests (more fees), and finally makes a decision on proper treatment (again, more fees).

I Won My Product Liability Trial, Now Manufacturer Has Filed an Appeal!

Published on: July 22, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, your lawsuit ain’t over till it’s over.

In a product liability case, most lawsuits end in a settlement. The plaintiff and the defendants work the case for a period of time, and eventually they sit down and hammer out a resolution to end the case. However, some product liability cases make it all the way to trial. I have written about jury verdicts in medical device and drug cases often on this site. Recently, for example, a young boy and his family won a whopping $70,000,000.00 verdict against Johnson & Johnson based on the boy’s disfigurement caused by the drug Risperdal. In that case, as in so many others, you may think that after years of litigation and after winning a complex jury trial that the plaintiff can finally leave the court system behind and get on with his life. But the case, sadly, may just be getting started. When medical device manufacturers and drug makers lose a big case with a large money award, expect them to throw the kitchen sink at you after the jury reaches its verdict. Let’s look a few things a defense team could do if it loses a big product liability case.

Bard IVC Filter Statute of Limitations Court Order a Victory for Injured

Published on: May 3, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

I would chalk up this court decision as a victory for any injured person dealing with the C.R. Bard IVC filter. I would also chalk up the decision as yet another example of the complexities of handling statutes of limitations in defective product cases.

As always, let’s take a step back. I have written about C.R. Bard’s potentially dangerous IVC filters, which you can read about here and here. In 2015 a multidistrict litigation (MDL) site was selected for lawsuits arising from injuries relating to Bard’s G2 Series and Recovery IVC filters. The primary complaints have been that the Bard IVC filters moved out of position and/or broke apart. Lawsuits mounted, and the MDL was formed.

Lurking in virtually every personal injury case is a statute of limitations defense. I wrote about statutes of limitations here. To recap, a statute of limitations is a law which limits the time when an injured person may bring a lawsuit for money damages. You miss the deadline, you lose your right to bring a lawsuit forever.

But as I have discussed before, determining when the clock starts running on your injury case is far from easy.

Bard Lawyers Sought Rigid Framework For Statute of Limitations Analysis

In the Bard IVC filter MDL, C.R. Bard lawyers filed a motion seeking a bright-line test to identify the running of the statutes of limitation. The defense lawyers asked Judge David Campbell to adopt a strict procedure for this analysis similar to the procedure used in the Mirena IUD MDL. (Yes, there is an MDL for women injured by Mirena IUDs made by Bayer Pharmaceuticals.) The Mirena procedure was determined in the case titled Truitt v. Bayer.

Your Product Liability Case and the (Dreaded) Statute of Limitations

Published on: April 27, 2016 | By Clay Hodges

The statute of limitations can be the strongest defense a product manufacturer will bring to defend itself and avoid paying money in a product liability lawsuit. It can be deadly to your medical device or drug case. The problem is, determining the proper deadline to bring your lawsuit is rarely simple. It is critical that you find someone who can figure out when the clock started ticking on your product liability case.

Definition

Let’s start with a simple definition: a statute of limitations is a state law which limits the time period when you may bring a lawsuit for money damages for a personal injury. In each state you have a certain number of years from the injury, or the date of discovery of the injury, to file a lawsuit and recover money for your injuries.

If you miss this deadline, you lose your right to bring the lawsuit, forever. These statutes must be taken very seriously.

Rationale

The rationale makes sense: citizens and companies do not need to be vulnerable to being sued indefinitely for an act of negligence. If you were in my grocery store twelve years ago, slipped on a banana peel, broke your arm, got medical treatment, recovered, then waited over a decade and finally sued me and my grocery store for negligence, it could be a serious hardship on me and deeply unfair. I need reasonable assurance that I won’t be exposed to lawsuits forever. So states across the country have written statutes that limit the amount of time an injured person can bring a lawsuit. Essentially, state legislatures are telling injured persons: we respect your right to sue for money damages when you are the victim of some kind of negligence, but don’t sleep on your rights. If you are hurt because of someone else, get on with it and file a lawsuit. And if you wait too long, you lose your right to recover damages.

(I don’t really own a grocery store.)

Determining When Your “Lawsuit Clock” Starts Ticking