Lawyers Identify 15 Bard PowerPort Injury Lawsuits for Next Phase of Bellwether Trial Discovery

Plaintiffs and defendants involved in the federal Bard PowerPort lawsuits have selected a group of 15 claims that will go through additional fact discovery, to prepare them for potential early “bellwether” trials. However, the lawyers have asked the U.S. District Judge presiding over the litigation to give them until April 2025, before they whittle the selections down to six that will be eligible to go before juries.

There are currently more than 800 product liability lawsuits being pursued in the federal court system over the Bard PowerPort, which is a totally implantable vascular access device (TIVAD) that is used to deliver chemotherapy and other medications directly into a patient’s blood vessels. It involves an injection port site, where the needle is inserted, as well as a polyurethane catheter tube that delivers fluid to the body.

However, each of the lawsuits raises similar allegations, claiming that the Bard PowerPort was defectively designed and prone to degrade inside the body, resulting in patients suffering severe and life-threatening port catheter fractures or port catheter infections, which often results in the need to undergo additional surgeries to remove the device.

Since August 2023, cases filed throughout the federal court system have been centralized in the District of Arizona, where U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell is presiding over coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings in a Bard PowerPort lawsuit MDL, or multidistrict litigation.

To help the parties gauge the relative strengths and weaknesses of their claims, and evaluate how juries may respond to certain evidence and testimony that will be repeated throughout the lawsuits, Judge Campbell has indicated that a series of early bellwether trials will be held in the MDL.

This process began with the selection of a group of 24 Bard PowerPort bellwether cases in December 2023, which have been going through case-specific discovery over the past year.

In a joint submission (PDF) on December 17, the parties pruned that list to a group of 15 cases that will move into the next phase of bellwether discovery, and they are currently required to identify six of those lawsuits in early March 2025, which will be eligible for the first Bard PowerPort trial dates.

However, the day after making their selections, the parties also filed a joint motion (PDF) requesting that Judge Campbell extend that deadline. They asked that they be given until April 7, 2025 to meet and confer, and determine whether they can agree on the potential trial cases. If they cannot reach an agreement, they propose a deadline of April 14, 2025, for competing proposals to be submitted with a memorandum explaining their respective positions.

“The Parties believe that a modest extension of these bellwether selection deadlines by approximately thirty-five (35) days will afford the Parties the opportunity to rely on information obtained during the extended discovery period, including from Plaintiffs’ expert disclosures, when making their bellwether selections with the goal of achieving a proportionate identification of representative cases,” the parties indicated.

While the outcomes of these early bellwether trials will not have any binding impact on other claims pending in the MDL or state courts, they are expected to have a major impact on future Bard PowerPort lawsuit settlement negotiations, which will be necessary to avoid hundreds of individual claims being set for trial in the coming years.