NexGen Plaintiffs Lawyers Bite Back at Zimmer

Lawyers representing plaintiffs in the NexGen lawsuits say Zimmer Holdings, Inc.’s claims that they should be sanctioned shows the company is running scared.

In its motion to sanction the lawyers, Zimmer noted that attorneys representing plaintiffs Mertha Shoat, Ronnie Davis and Debra Teague had missed a July 15 deadline for producing expert reports without providing advance notice that a deadline was going to be missed, or required an extension. Zimmer’s motion claims that such “repeated abandonment of Zimmer case picks has unreasonable and vexatiously multiplied these MDL (multidistrict litigation) proceedings and justifies sanctions.”

“Regrettable Scare Tactic”

Attorneys for the plaintiffs are having none of it, referring to Zimmer’s position as “a regrettable scare tactic.”

“Rather than face the music in the bellwether trial process, Zimmer ran scared and selected cases they knew were not triable, ” said an attorney representing the plaintiffs. “They were even warned of that by plaintiffs’ counsel at the outset. Instead of getting to the truth, Zimmer ran up costs and time at their own peril. Now they’re seeking relief for their own contrived crisis. What’s really sanctionable is their conduct here.”

Gordon Gibb writes on September 12, 2014 on the website, LawyersandSettlements.com, that with one Zimmer NexGen lawsuit currently underway in federal court in Illinois, both sides are employing various strategies in an effort to further the fortunes of the various antagonists.

A collection of lawsuits alleging Zimmer’s NexGen knee replacement failure were consolidated into one multidistrict litigation in August 2011.

We’ve got ourselves a legal kerfuffle.