In light of the coronavirus outbreak, the U.S. District Judge presiding over the Bard hernia mesh litigation decided to push the starting dates for the first two bellwether trials back to July and September 2020.  U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus, who presides over all federal hernia mesh lawsuits against C.R. Bard, issued two case management orders on March 24^th announcing the new jury trial dates. Now, the start of the first bellwether trial will begin July 13, 2020 and the second trial will begin September 29. Thousands of other lawsuits and trials across the country have been postponed, as well, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, medical manufacturer C.R. Bard faces over 3,500 product liability lawsuits in the federal court system over their hernia mesh implants. Patients across the country claim Bard’s surgical mesh implants were faulty and caused individuals to experience severe complications, some of which required another painful surgery to fix. Specific mesh models named in the hernia mesh lawsuits include Bard’s Ventralight, Ventralex, Perfix, and 3DMax patch designs among others.

Due to the thousands of similar hernia mesh lawsuits all alleging common questions of fact and law, the federal judiciary decided to consolidate the claims as part of a Bard hernia mesh litigation in the Southern District of Ohio. Judge Sargus decided to establish a bellwether process, which sets up a series of early trial dates to see how juries react to certain evidence and testimonies that will be repeated throughout the hernia mesh lawsuits. If a settlement is not reached to resolve the thousands of hernia mesh lawsuits field in the litigation, each case may be remanded back to the courts they were originally filed in for future individual trial dates.