J&J Pays About $1 Billion to Resolve Pinnacle-Hip Suits (Bloomberg)
Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay about $1 billion to resolve most lawsuits claiming it sold defective metal-on-metal hips that ultimately had to be removed, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
With the agreement, J&J has now resolved more than 95 percent of the 6,000 cases in which surgeons extracted the Pinnacle implants because of defects that left patients unable to walk and in pain, according to two people familiar with the settlements. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to talk publicly about the accords.
The roughly $1 billion total includes an earlier settlement for more than $400 million. Still pending are about 4,500 suits by patients with artificial hips that aren’t made totally of metal or haven’t been surgically removed, the people said. It’s unclear how many, if any, of those cases will be settled, they said.
Rather than set up a global settlement program, attorneys for J&J and its DePuy unit, maker of the Pinnacle hip replacements, cut separate deals with plaintiffs’ lawyers to resolve their clients’ cases, the peopl...
