First Bard IVC Filter Bellwether Trial Ends in $3.6 Million Verdict for Sherr-Una Booker

In June 2007, Sherr-Una Booker received a Bard G2 inferior vena cava filter, a small metal device implanted to catch blood clots before they could reach her lungs. The filter did not hold up. It tilted inside the vein, perforated the wall of the vena cava, and fractured. One of the broken metal struts traveled to her heart.

Booker needed open-heart surgery to deal with the migrated fragment. Surgeons could not retrieve every piece, and part of the filter stayed lodged in the wall of her vena cava. Her case became the first to reach a jury out of thousands filed against the manufacturer.

Those lawsuits had been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation before Judge David G. Campbell in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona. Robert Boatman and Mark O'Connor of the Phoenix firm Gallagher & Kennedy served as lead counsel for the plaintiffs, assembling the proof that the G2 line fractured and migrated at high rates. By the time of trial the consolidated litigation had grown to several thousand cases. Booker's claim was selected as the first bellwether, a test trial meant to show how juries would weigh the evidence.

Over a trial that ran through March 2018, the plaintiffs' team argued that Bard had failed to warn doctors and patients about the device's failure rate even though the company's own records tracked fractures, migrations, and deaths tied to the G2. The filter had been sold between roughly 2002 and 2010 and marketed as a retrievable option. Jurors heard that at least a dozen deaths and hundreds of complications had been linked to the line.

On March 30, 2018, the jury found Bard liable for negligent failure to warn. It set Booker's compensatory damages at $2 million, then assigned 20 percent of the fault to her implanting physician, which cut Bard's share to $1.6 million. The jury added $2 million in punitive damages after concluding the company had acted with conscious disregard for patient safety. Bard prevailed on the competing design-defect claim. Together the awards reached $3.6 million.

Bard fought the result after trial and then took it to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 2020, the appeals court affirmed the judgment, leaving the $1.6 million compensatory award and the $2 million punitive award in place.