Zimmer (NYSE:ZMH) yesterday chose another set of lawsuits to serve as bellwether cases in the multi-district litigation over its NexGen knee implants.
More than 5,900 NexGen product liability lawsuits have been consolidated under Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer of the U.S. District Court for Northern Illinois.
Although 3 cases were selected as bellwethers last year, lawyers for the plaintiffs withdrew the cases, prompting Zimmer to ask Pallmeyer to sanction the attorneys who brought the suits. That motion has been continued, according to court documents.
Yesterday Zimmer filed a motion selecting, without comment, 3 more cases as its nominees for bellwether trials, according to the documents.
The plaintiffs in those cases are a woman in Arkansas, the bankruptcy estate of an Illinois couple and a man in Minnesota (Ebarb v. Zimmer; Dobrzynski by Trustee Fogel v. Zimmer; and Lawrence v. Zimmer), according to the documents.
Zimmer is gearing up for the closing of its $13.35 billion acquisition of cross-town orthopedics rival Biomet, which could come as soon as the end of March. Last week Zimmer said it would float a $7.7 billion bond offering to help cover the cash portion of the Biomet buy.
