The lawsuit was filed by James N., a man from Arizona who was injured by the G2® Retrievable Inferior Vena Cava Filter (“IVC Filter”) manufactured by C.R. Bard and Bard Peripheral Vascular Inc.
The IVC Filter was surgically implanted in his vein at a hospital in Illinois on September 24, 2008 for the purpose of preventing blood clot complications in his lungs, such as Pulmonary Embolism (PE).
The problem is that the G2 IVC Filter failed to perform as advertised by C.R. Bard, resulting in injury to the plaintiff. C.R. Bard is accused of negligence for selling a defective medical device.
C.R. Bard gained approval for the G2 IVC Filter in 2005 and pulled it off the market in 2010, after selling about 160,000 devices nationwide. Hundreds of injuries and at least 12 deaths are now blamed on the G2, according to a NBC News investigation in 2015.
In November 2010 — the same year the G2 was withdrawn — a study linked the G2 with high rates of fracture and embolization of the broken pieces to vital organs in a patient’s body. Out of 52 patients with the G2, 12% (6) fractured into pieces. In 2 of these fractures, broken shards of the filter hit a patients’s heart.
C.R. Bard is now facing over 2,200 IVC Filter lawsuits nationwide, mostly involving the G2® IVC Filter and Bard’s 1st-generation IVC Filter, the Recovery®. Studies now estimate that both of these filters fracture in around 40% of patients within 5 years of implantation.
The lawsuit was filed on July 18, 2017 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona — Case 2:17-cv-02389-DGC.
The case will be centralized with thousands of other Bard IVC filter lawsuits in Multi-District Litigation (MDL No. 2641) — In Re: Bard IVC Filters Products Liability Litigation.
The plaintiff is represented by Ben C. Martin of The Law Offices of Ben C. Martin in Dallas, Texas. He a trial attorney who serves on the plaintiffs’ steering committee of the Bard IVC Filter MDL.
