Judge Declines To Extend Bard PowerPort Lawsuit Deadlines Under Discovery Schedule

The U.S. District Judge presiding over all Bard PowerPort lawsuits has rejected a request to extend fact discovery by approximately two months, indicating that parties should continue to work to complete all depositions by the end of January 2025, to keep cases on track for early bellwether trials.

There are currently more than 700 product liability lawsuits being pursued in the federal court system involving problems with the Bard PowerPort, which is a totally implantable vascular access device (TIVAD) used to deliver chemotherapy and other medications directly into a patient’s blood vessel.

The port catheter device involves an injection port site, where a needle is inserted, as well as a polyurethane catheter tube that delivers the fluid to the body. However, plaintiffs indicate that they experienced severe and life-threatening complications due to design defects, which led to port catheter fractures and port catheter infections.

Faced with the rapidly growing litigation, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) established a Bard PowerPort lawsuit MDL in August 2023, centralizing claims brought throughout the federal court system before U.S. District Judge David G. Campbell in the District of Arizona, to shepherd the claims through coordinated pretrial proceedings.

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.

Early in the litigation, Judge Campbell directed the parties to select a group of 24 initial Bard PowerPort bellwether lawsuits, which have been going through case-specific discovery and are being prepared for the first trial dates in the litigation.

Fact discovery in those cases has been scheduled to be conclude in January 2025. However, in a joint memorandum (PDF) submitted last month, plaintiffs requested a two-month extension of the Bard PowerPort lawsuit deadlines, which would have pushed discovery into March 2025. Plaintiffs said the intervening holidays limit their ability to depose key witnesses in the litigation, indicating that they have had to schedule eight unexpectedly late depositions for December.

In a court order (PDF) issued on November 8, Judge Campbell rejected the request for an extension, ordering the parties to work together to schedule all depositions between now and the end of January. However, the Court indicates that it will revisit the issue at the next Bard PowerPort case management conference on December 3, 2024.

After case-specific discovery is complete, it is expected that the parties will select a smaller group of six bellwether claims by March 10, 2025, which will be eligible for the first trial dates, which may begin by late 2025 or early 2026.

While the outcomes of these early bellwether trials will not have any binding impact on other claims pending in the MDL, they will likely have a major impact on Bard PowerPort settlement negotiations and any attempt to resolve large numbers of claims.