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 Following a two-month trial, jurors deliberated for a week before
finding that the Pinnacle hips were defectively designed, and that
the companies failed to warn the public about their risks. Jurors
awarded about $140 million in total compensatory damages and about
$360 million in punitive damages, said Mark Lanier, lead trial
counsel for the plaintiffs.
A J&J spokeswoman said the company will appeal.
John Beisner, a lawyer for the company, said he expected the verdict
to be a "pyrrhic victory for plaintiffs' counsel" that could be
slashed significantly. Appeals courts often reduce massive
personal-injury verdicts, and Texas law limits the amount of
punitive damages that can be awarded to plaintiffs.
Beisner estimated that punitive damages could be reduced to as
little as $10 million. Lanier said plaintiffs would address the
issue in post-trial proceedings.
Lanier said the nine jurors returned a carefully considered verdict.
"There are thousands of these cases, and J&J needs to get
responsible," he added.
The verdict came in the second federal trial involving the Pinnacle
device. J&J was cleared of liability in the first trial, which ended
in 2014.
Verdicts in these early trials are not binding on the rest of the
litigation, but are used to help gauge the value of the remaining
claims. More than 8,000 Pinnacle lawsuits have been consolidated in
Texas federal court.
All five plaintiffs are Texas residents who were implanted with
metal-on-metal Pinnacle hip devices. They said design flaws caused
the devices to fail more frequently and quickly than expected,
leading to injuries including tissue death, bone erosion and high
levels of metal in their blood.
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Plaintiffs said J&J and DePuy described the metal-on-metal hips as
long-lasting, durable and safe despite being aware of the risks, and
aggressively promoted them for use in younger, more active patients.
J&J has said that it researched and marketed the devices
responsibly.
DePuy stopped selling the metal-on-metal version of the Pinnacle
devices in 2013. That year, it paid $2.5 billion to settle more than
7,000 lawsuits over a separate metal-on-metal hip device, the ASR,
which was recalled in 2010.
Shares of Johnson & Johnson fell 0.6 percent, or 67 cents, to close
at $106.74 on the New York Stock Exchange.
(Reporting by Jessica Dye, Editing by G Crosse, Alexia Garamfalvi
and Richard Chang)
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