Personal Injury Law

610 Cases Were In Federal Court NuvaRing MDL And 110 Complaints Filed In New Jersey State Court

(Posted by Tom Lamb at DrugInjuryWatch.com)

The following information about the number of NuvaRing lawsuits that had been filed before January 2011 comes from page 129 of the Merck & Co., Inc. Form 10-K Annual Report For the Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2010, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on February 28, 2011:

Beginning in May 2007, a number of complaints were filed in various jurisdictions asserting claims against the Company?s subsidiaries Organon USA, Inc., Organon Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc., Organon International (collectively, ?Organon?), and Schering-Plough arising from Organon?s marketing and sale of NuvaRing, a combined hormonal contraceptive vaginal ring....

As of December 31, 2010, there were approximately 730 NuvaRing cases. Of these cases, 610 are pending in the NuvaRing MDL in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri before Judge Rodney Sippel, and approximately 110 are pending in consolidated discovery proceedings in the Bergen County Superior Court of New Jersey before Judge Brian R. Martinotti. Four additional cases are pending in various other state courts.

As background, in August 2008 the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPMDL) granted a petition filed by plaintiffs in 11 NuvaRing federal court lawsuits seeking creation of a NuvaRing multidistrict litigation (MDL).

By means of this August 2008 NuvaRing MDL order, those 11 NuvaRing cases and the 719 additional NuvaRing lawsuits filed in the federal court system (as of 12/31/11, according to Merck) have been centralized, or consolidated.  The federal court NuvaRing MDL case is called In re: NuvaRing Products Liability Litigation, No. 08-md-1964, JPML.

In March 2009 the New Jersey Supreme Court designated all pending and future NuvaRing cases as a "mass tort" and assigned them for centralized management in Bergen County by Judge Jonathan N. Harris, who has since been replaced by Judge Martinotti.

At present, it appears that the first trials will begin some time during the spring or summer of 2012 in the federal court NuvaRing MDL and the NJ NuvaRing consolidaton.

Generally, these NuvaRing lawsuits involve blood clot-related injuries such as pulmonary embolism (PE), deep vein thrombosis (DVT), strokes, and heart attacks allegedly caused by use of the NuvaRing birth control product.

More NuvaRing lawsuits have been filed in the first part of 2011 and other new NuvaRing cases will be filed later this year by our law firm and other attorneys who are active in the this still-growing NuvaRing litigation.

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