Jury Finds for Plaintiff In Xarelto Trial- Awards $27.8 Million

A Philadelphia jury last week found in favor Lynn Hartman against the manufacturers of the anticoagulant Xarelto. The jury came back from a little over a day of deliberations with an award of $27.8 million. The main defendants in the case were Johnson & Johnson and Bayer AG. The award included roughly $26 million in punitive damages. Hartman suffered serious gastrointestinal bleeding while on the medication. She was an Indiana resident who began taking the drug in 2013.

As part of her claims, Hartman argued that the defendants should have included additional warnings over excessive bleeding risks and that the warnings were inadequate.  The three-week trial centered around arguments that the drug's warning label originally excluded information that the rate of bleeds observed in a clinical trial was significantly higher among patients in the United States than patients elsewhere in the world. Her attorneys proffered evidence that the rate among participants in the United States was 8.1 percent annually versus 3.6 percent annually among participants globally. The information was later added to the drug's labeling in September 2015 as part of the FDA’s efforts to standardize labeling for all of the so-called novel oral anticoagulant medications that have been approved in recent years.

The plaintiff’s case was bolstered by testimony from former Food & Drug Administration chief David Kessler, who told jurors that he believed the Xarelto warning label had lacked key information about the severity of the potential bleeding risk associated with the drug.

Her case is one of about 1,500 pending as part of a consolidated mass tort program in Philadelphia County. The Bayer and Janssen defendants had won defense verdicts in three previous Xarelto injury cases tried out of a multidistrict litigation program in Louisiana federal court earlier this year. Those cases focused on arguments that drugmakers should have encouraged doctors to conduct laboratory testing on their patients to more precisely determine their risk of bleeding from Xarelto. The defense won those cases largely on the learned intermediary doctrine, under which drugmakers must provide all necessary warnings to prescribing physicians in order to properly weigh the risks and benefits of a medication.

The defendants in the Philadelphia trial have vowed to appeal and have already presented the learned-intermediary arguments to the trial court as part of a motion for a directed verdict in the case.

A second case in the consolidated actions is scheduled to go to trial in Philadelphia in January.

Pittman, Dutton & Hellums, P.C., is currently investigating Xarelto cases. If you or a loved one were prescribed Xarelto and suffered an irreversible internal bleeding that lead to hospitalization and/or death, contact Booth Samuels at toll free 1-866-515-8880 or by email at booths@pittmanudutton.com.

J&J Talc News

Ovarian cancer injuries are not the only injury of which plaintiffs have filed against Johnson & Johnson concerning their talcum based powder, generally known as baby powder. Earlier this month, a California jury on Thursday sided with Johnson & Johnson and its talc supplier of any liability for a woman’s terminal mesothelioma, an asbestos-related cancer, holding that there was no evidence that the companies’ talcum powder was unsafe. The jury deliberated for nearly two days after an almost four-week trial.  The jury found that J&J did not negligently design or sell its talc, that the talc did not fail to perform as safely as a reasonable consumer would have expected, that the talc was not defective, and that J&J did not fail to warn of any potential risks, "known or knowable based on general scientific knowledge at time of sale." 

Most of the cases we have seen so far involve claims that the talcum-based powder causes ovarian cancer. In one of those cases, a Missouri state judge upheld a jury’s $110 million verdict against Johnson & Johnson for selling ovarian cancer-causing products, saying the conduct on which the claims are based occurred in Missouri even though the woman who brought them is from Virginia. 

Since J&J used a Missouri-based company, Pharma Tech, to "manufacture, mislabel and package" the talc products at issue, Judge Rex M. Burlison found that the verdict for the plaintiff was within the jurisdictional standards laid out by the U.S. Supreme Court in its June decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California. This finding means that non-Missouri plaintiffs may continue pursuing their cases in Missouri, which has been home to a large amount of talc litigation in recent years.

Booth Samuels and the attorneys at Pittman, Dutton & Hellums, P.C. are currently accepting talc-injury cases. If you or someone you love is a female that regularly used J&J Baby Powder or Shower to Shower and, since the year 2000, have been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, please contact Booth Samuels at 1-866-515-8880 or by email at booths@pittmandutton.com for a free consultation.

Pennsylvania Jury Deliberating in Xarelto Trial

The fourth Xarelto-related product liability case to go to trial went to the jury on Friday as attorneys accused Johnson and Johnson and Bayer of deliberately understating the risks of serious internal bleeding associated with the blockbuster drug. This case was tried in Pennsylvania state court, and not through the Federal MDL out of New Orleans.

The case is one of more than 1,500 Xarelto-related cases pending as part of a mass tort program in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas. The prior three trials in the MDL resulted in verdicts for the Defendants.

The case centered on arguments that the drugmakers failed to include information in Xarelto’s warning label indicating that the rate of bleeding events observed in a clinical trial was significantly higher among patients in the United States than patients elsewhere in the world. According to evidence in the case, the rate among participants in the United States was 8.1 percent annually versus 3.6 percent annually among participants globally. The label was ultimately updated in September 2015 to include such information.

Pittman, Dutton & Hellums, P.C., is currently investigating Xarelto cases. If you or a loved one were prescribed Xarelto and suffered an irreversible internal bleeding that lead to hospitalization and/or death, contact Booth Samuels at toll free 1-866-515-8880 or by email at booths@pittmanudutton.com.