A hip replacement patient from Hawaii has added his hip implant lawsuit to the thousands already filed over Johnson & Johnson’s DePuy ASR hip implant.

Plaintiff Richard B. received a DePuy ASR hip implant in his left hip in November 2007. He alleges in his metal hip replacement lawsuit that after that surgery, he suffered from “pain, stiffness, discomfort, and weakness which in turn negatively affects [his] mobility and quality of life.”

Richard also alleges he suffers from anxiety about the recalled hip implant, the risk of metal toxicity it has exposed him to, and the future medical monitoring he will need. He claims all these harms resulted from implantation of his DePuy ASR metal hip implant.

His hip replacement surgery lawsuit mentions he has not yet scheduled surgery to remove the implant, known as explantation or revision surgery.

DePuy Hip Recall

The ASR hip implant first entered the market in 2005. Johnson & Johnson touted it as offering a 20-year service life and better mechanical function than other hip implants.

However, implant recipients began reporting unexpected hip implant complications. Studies found these metal-on-metal hip implants tended to flake chromium and cobalt into the bloodstream, sometimes leading to metallosis and development of pseudotumors.

Johnson & Johnson began to recall 93,000 ASR hip implants in August 2010. The company stated publicly that 12 percent of those implants failed within five years. However, their internal documents showed a failure rate of 37 percent over 4.6 years.

The DePuy Hip Implant Settlement

Since news of the defects began to spread, Johnson & Johnson has faced about 12,000 separate metal-on-metal hip implant lawsuits. In a 2013 settlement agreement, Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle existing ASR hip implant lawsuits.

Later, in February 2015, Johnson & Johnson agreed to a new settlement offering to resolve newer lawsuits filed as late as Jan. 31, 2015. The new accord will provide around $300,000 in compensation for each of 1,400 patients who had ASR hip implants removed since 2013, pushing the total amount of compensation for all covered claims to around $3 billion.

About 2 percent of plaintiffs who were offered the metal hip implant settlement have rejected the offer, ostensibly to continue pursuing their claims. It’s possible those plaintiffs were emboldened by the news of an $8.3 million damage award that a California plaintiff won when his hip implant lawsuit went to a jury trial in 2013. And in February 2015, an Oklahoma jury awarded $2.5 million to a woman who had opted out of Johnson & Johnson’s 2013 hip implant settlement offer.

In his DePuy metal hip lawsuit, Richard is asserting claims based on several allegations including: negligence, strict liability for defective design and manufacturing of a product and for failure to warn, breach of warranty, fraud, misrepresentation, and violation of state consumer protection laws.

Richard is seeking compensation for economic loss, pain and suffering, and emotional distress. He is also asking for awards of punitive damages, disgorgement of profits, and attorneys’ fees.

This Metal-on-Metal Hip Implant Lawsuit is part of the DePuy ASR Hip Replacement Multidistrict Litigation, or MDL, In re: DePuy Orthopaedics Inc. ASR Hip Implant Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 1:10-md-2197, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.