Hernia Mesh Summary Judgment Motion Upheld

Hernia Mesh Summary Judgment Motion Upheld

Introduction

The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a summary judgment motion granted to C.R. Bard in a hernia mesh lawsuit filed by the estate of a victim who died in October 2006 allegedly due to the defective design of the mesh.

The three-judge panel found that the plaintiff's experts were unable to establish that the hernia mesh implanted in the victim was the reason for her death. In October 2006, the victim was taken to the emergency room with an abdominal-wall abscess and later experienced a heart attack at the end of the month. In the lawsuit filed against Bard and Davol, the cause of her death was mentioned to be pneumonia. However, the victim’s estate alleged that the hernia patch was defective in nature and was the reason for her death. A medical expert retained by the estate for this case, stated, the memory ring within the patch, which enables the patch to stick to the abdominal wall was buckled, rubbed up against the bowel causing a break, then sealed up before the discovery of the mesh in the bowel. One of the experts admitted he did not examine or view the victim’s patch.

The district court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss all expert findings that the medical expert’s statement failed to qualify the Evidence Rule 702’s reliability threshold and the other expert was not qualified to have an opinion on medical causation. The Southern District Court entered summary judgment, which was appealed by the estate, but the decision was upheld by the 7th Circuit excluding the expert testimony and relying on the medical expert’s testimony. The multidistrict litigation has been formed in the Northern District of Georgia, overlooked by U.S. District Judge Richard Story for coordinated pretrial proceedings.