Dallas Jury Awards $1.04 Billion Against J&J Over Defective Pinnacle Hip Implants
After trial: Reduced to about $543 million under punitive damages caps; the Pinnacle claims later resolved in a roughly $1 billion global settlement in 2019.
Won by The Lanier Law Firm (lead counsel) and Walkup Personal Injury Lawyers (co-counsel).
A Dallas federal jury awarded $1.04 billion to six California patients harmed by Johnson and Johnson's metal-on-metal Pinnacle hip implants, with W. Mark Lanier leading an eight-week trial that produced one of the largest product-liability verdicts of 2016.
What happened
Johnson and Johnson sold its DePuy Pinnacle Ultamet hip system to roughly 150,000 Americans before pulling the device from the market in 2013, years after internal testing had raised questions about how its metal-on-metal bearing surface performed inside a human body. The implant paired a cobalt-chromium ball against a cobalt-chromium socket. Over time, friction between the two components shed metallic debris into surrounding tissue and, in many patients, into the bloodstream.
Six California residents, including lead plaintiff Angie Rodriguez, each underwent surgery to have a Pinnacle implant placed and later faced revision operations to remove it. They filed claims in the multidistrict litigation consolidated before U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade in the Northern District of Texas, MDL 2244, one of the largest device-liability dockets in federal court.
W. Mark Lanier tried the case over eight weeks in the fall of 2016. The plaintiffs argued that DePuy and its parent company knew the metal-on-metal design carried failure risks that far exceeded what the company disclosed to surgeons or patients, and that J&J chose not to conduct pre-market human clinical testing before releasing the device. The jury found the Pinnacle implant negligently designed and concluded that J&J had fraudulently marketed it while concealing known dangers from physicians.
On December 1, 2016, the jury returned a verdict of $1.04 billion, composed of $32 million in compensatory damages spread across the six plaintiffs and approximately $1.008 billion in punitive damages. The award ranked among the three largest jury verdicts of any type in the United States that year and was the largest punitive award against a company in 2016.
Judge Kinkeade subsequently reduced the punitive portion to align with constitutional due-process limits on the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages, bringing the total to approximately $543 million. Johnson and Johnson appealed, contesting both the liability findings and the size of the award.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Insurance Journal: J&J Hit with $1 Billion Verdict in Hip Implant Case (Dec. 2, 2016)·Archived copy
- 2.Fox News: Johnson and Johnson hit with over $1 billion verdict on hip implants (Dec. 2016)·Archived copy
- 3.ABC7: Billion Dollar Baby: lawsuits over profit, pain and the hip implant some call toxic (2016)·Archived copy
- 4.KALB/AP - Verdict exceeds $1 billion in Pinnacle hip implant trial·Archived copy
- 5.Expert Institute - $1 billion Pinnacle hip verdict against J&J·Archived copy
- 6.National Law Review - Billion-dollar verdict in DePuy Pinnacle hip lawsuit·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from The Lanier Law Firm
All The Lanier Law Firm proven verdicts →As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.
A St. Louis jury in July 2018 awarded 22 women and their families $4.69 billion, the largest U.S. verdict of that year, finding that asbestos in Johnson & Johnson's talcum powder products caused ovarian cancer; a Missouri appellate court upheld $2.11 billion in 2020.
After a six-week federal trial, a jury found three of the nation's largest retail pharmacy chains created a public nuisance by flooding Lake and Trumbull Counties, Ohio with opioid pills, and a judge ordered $650 million to fund a 15-year abatement plan.
Hours before opening arguments in the first federal opioid bellwether trial, Cuyahoga and Summit counties in Ohio secured a $260 million settlement from distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson, plus manufacturer Teva.
Related product liability verdicts
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As co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation and the first firm to sue Monsanto in 2015, Weitz and Luxenberg helped negotiate a $10.9 billion settlement resolving approximately 125,000 non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims against Bayer-owned Monsanto.
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