Judicial Panel Claims Zimmer Knee’s “High-Flex” Shows No Improvement

All federal lawsuits over problems with Zimmer NexGen knee replacements have been consolidated for pretrial proceedings as part of an MDL, or multidistrict litigation, which will be centralized in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.Following oral arguments last month, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation issued an order on Monday establishing the MDL, which will result in the transfer of dozens of Zimmer NexGen knee implant Zimmer knee lawsuit. The panel indicated that there are currently 28 cases that will be transferred into the MDL, and there appear to be at least 45 related claims pending that may be included in the MDL as well. In addition, all future lawsuits will be transferred to the MDL as they are filed by Zimmer knee lawyer who are continuing to review claims for individuals throughout the country.

Zimmer opposed consolidation of the lawsuits, arguing that it will not promote the efficient litigation of the cases, as there are at least eight different artificial Zimmer knee problems products made by the company that are included in various lawsuits.
The medical device manufacturer argued that each Zimmer NexGen knee model would have to go through its own discovery process, and that consolidated discovery would be made harder by the requirement to protect the company’s trade secrets.More than 200,000 potentially defective Zimmer NexGen knee replacement components may have been used throughout the United States, which could have caused thousands of people to experience problems or require additional knee revision surgery due to early failure of their knee replacement.

Zimmer obtained approval for the NexGen knee replacement components through the FDA’s controversial 510(k) approval process, which is a fast-track to market approval that requires that you prove that the device you are releasing is “substantially equivalent” to one already on the market. Zimmer knee lawyers have been arguing that the very reason why many of these devices were implanted, due to their supposed High-Flex design, misled many people to be implanted with a device that has failed. Studies have shown that the increase in flexibility has increased by only 2 degrees in patients who received them. This, it is argued, is an insignificant increase in motion for the failure rates that have been experienced.