Briefing Completed In Half-Billion-Dollar Verdict In Pinnacle MDL

This post comes from the Cozen O'Connor side of the blog.

Plaintiffs and defendants have now completed briefing before the Fifth Circuit on defendants' appeal of the $498 million verdict in the second bellwether trial of the Pinnacle hip implant MDL. Obviously, there is a lot riding on this appeal. In March, we laid out for you the manner in which defendants' opening brief addressed certain key issues. Below, we discuss the defendants' responses, in their reply brief, to the arguments that plaintiffs make on those key issues in their opening brief:

Design Defect Verdict: While defendants have offered a number of reasons to overturn the verdict on design defect, the survival of that portion of the verdict could very well turn on whether plaintiffs can convince the Fifth Circuit that an allegedly safer alternative design for DePuy's metal-on-metal hip implant, a necessary element of a design defect claim, can be an entirely different product—a metal-on-polyethylene