Hip Replacement Lawsuits in Maryland
There was an article on Bloomberg this week about hip replacement lawsuits in Maryland state courts. The first case appears to be going to trial in circuit court in Prince George’s County. The case is against Depuy, a subsidiary of J&J, or Johnson and Johnson for all you literally literal lawyers. This caused me to check the database for Maryland cases against Depuy. Often, product liability cases are in federal court. There were, however, quite a few cases found in the Maryland system.
In total, there were 37 cases against Depuy. Can we be sure they were all Maryland hip replacement cases? No, certainly not. However, only four of the 37 cases were filed before 2009. Therefore, that’s 33 probable hip replacement lawsuits in Maryland courts against Depuy in just three and a half years. Of the 33, ten cases were open and active. Of the ten cases, six were in Prince George’s County (the subject of the original Bloomberg story), two were in Baltimore City and two were in Baltimore County.
While Venable appears to be the primary defense firm, plaintiffs lawyers for hip replacement cases in Maryland appear to all over the map. And in this case, literally. Most of the lawyers for the plaintiffs are out-of-state, including all of the PG county cases. In Baltimore, Don Discepolo, Thomas Summers and Glenn Mintzner of The Law Offices of Peter Angelos, David Freishtat of Freishtat, Mullen & Dubnow, and Philip Federico are all handling cases.
Quite a few of the closed artificial hip claims in Maryland seem to be from Peter Angelos’s office. It certainly makes you think those cases went federal. That, however, unlike most of the facts listed above, is mere speculation.