Defective Hip Implants: Problems With Profemur Hip Replacement

Attorney Explains Options for Recipients of Wright Medical Profemur Hip System

Video Transcript:

George McLaughlin:

If you go to your orthopedic surgeon, you can ask, “Hey, what kind of hardware do I have?” And if they tell you it's a Wright Medical, that's something you should look into.

Rob Rosenthal:

How do you know if your hip implant is one that's involved in a lawsuit, and what do you do? Well, we're going to get some answers because we're going to ask the lawyer those questions and more today.

Hi again, everybody. I'm Rob Rosenthal with askthelawyers.com, and my guest today is Colorado attorney George McLaughlin. George, thank you for making some time to answer our questions again.

George McLaughlin:

Thank you for having me, Rob.

Rob Rosenthal:

So let's talk about these hip implants, the problems with them, and there's one or two specific ones that are a problem. Take us through that, George.

George McLaughlin:

Well, there's several that are a problem. There are a couple of different issues with the artificial hips that have been failing. One is the bearing surface where you have a metal acetabular component and a metal femoral head. I happen to have a couple of them right here. And you get wear and debris from the friction over time, even though these are highly machined. Particles from the bearing surfaces do wear off and can cause problems in your body and lead to the failure of the hip.

The other problem, which I've been heavily involved in, is where a hip stem that has a head on it, later in the body breaks. This is actually a broken hip that was explanted or taken out of one of my clients. And this device here, it's called the modular neck, over time from a very slight amount of movement and corrosion can crack and it can just break in two. But there's yet another problem which is, without breaking, you get corrosion going on in the next stem junction, which can lead to failure of the hip.

Rob Rosenthal:

Are these from a specific manufacturer or are all hip replacements having these issues?

George McLaughlin:

Several manufacturers have problems with the bearing surfaces, but the hips that I've been spending a lot of time on in the last several years, are hips that were made by a company called Wright Medical Technology, a company that was just recently acquired by Striker, another medical device manufacturer. Wright Medical made this modular hip that has the problem of fracturing, and I've had, gosh, 80 to 100 of those cases over the past several years. It's a significant problem with what's called the Wright Medical Profemur Hip System.

Rob Rosenthal:

Is it a situation, George, where a lot of people have those hips, and it’s kind of a ticking time bomb? In your opinion.

George McLaughlin:

In my opinion, it is. I've seen a number of these that were taken out that haven't yet broken. They were taken out for other reasons, and when we were able to subject the hip stem to an industrial strength X-ray, more radiation than you can put into the body, you can see into the device itself, and we're able to see that in some of these that have been removed from patients for other reasons, they were in the process of fracturing, they had just not yet broken. So I'm concerned that given enough time and activity, all of them in theory, could break. As a practical matter, that's not going to happen because not everyone is as active or will live long enough for them to bring. But they break anywhere from three years after implant up until now. They continue to break. I have clients of mine, patients who have had these breaks after they were implanted for ten years, and suddenly it just snaps and you have no notice that it’s coming.

Rob Rosenthal:

And I guess it’s similar to just breaking a leg or breaking a hip?

George McLaughlin:

Yeah, well this is your femur; this replaces the bone connecting your femur to your hip. And when this breaks, boom. Down, you go.

Rob Rosenthal:

So there is litigation involved. Tell us what the MDL is and what that means, and what the process is?

George McLaughlin:

I've been doing these cases one at a time for many, many years now, and the volume of the cases has gotten to the point with the multiple problems that the Profemur product has—the fracture of the neck stem, corrosion, that we filed a motion for consolidating the cases from pretrial work up. It's called a multi-district litigation, MDL for short. We filed that motion in federal court last May, the motion was granted, and just last week we had our first hearing on this. The court gathered us together, it was remotely, but for our first hearing in the MDL, they are close to 100 cases now that have been associated into the multidistrict litigation. They'll be worked up together for a trial, and then eventually each case goes back to its home jurisdiction if it's not settled for trial.

Rob Rosenthal:

So in an MDL, the individual still gets their own trial?

George McLaughlin:

Everybody has an individual case. Multi-district litigation or an MDL is not a class action, but it saves a lot of time and money for all the individual claimants because they get to pool their effort, to pool the resources that we lawyers are putting into developing the evidence. So we develop the evidence in one big package and it's available to everybody. We don't have to do it over and over and over again, case by case.

Rob Rosenthal:

Sometimes we see in these cases large verdicts or what are called bellwethers. Explain that to me; what a bellwether is and how it might affect the MDL.

George McLaughlin:

A bellwether trial is where the court that's handling the multi-district litigation decides, “Okay, we've got everything ready to go for a trial, but before I send these back to their home jurisdictions, let's try a case or two or three and see what the result is.” That will give both sides, plaintiffs and defendants, an idea of, “Well, if we went out and tried all these 100 cases, what's probably going to happen?”

And so the MDL court, the multi-district litigation court, convenes a trial in its court, and they do a trial with its supposed to be a representative plaintiff, not an outlier, not somebody that had catastrophic results from their surgery, kind of the typical case. And when they try these multi-district litigation cases, sometimes they group plaintiffs together, and so rather than just trying one case from one plaintiff, they'll have three, four, or five plaintiffs all grouped together in one trial, and they'll try the liability issue and all the damages all at once. And when you have a trial like that, often the verdicts when they've been in favor of the plaintiffs get rather large.

Rob Rosenthal:

With an MDL, could the defendant say, “You know what, we're going to just settle right now with everybody involved.” And are the people, the individual cases, are they bound to accept that settlement. How does that work?

George McLaughlin:

Often in a multi-district litigation, before the cases are remanded, there is an effort made to settle the cases. The settlement proposal in one form or another is put on the table by the defendant or defendants; it is never something that is forced on any plaintiff. Each plaintiff individually gets to decide do I or do I not want this settlement. Unlike a class action where if you participate in the class you get what the settlement is. But these are individual settlements; that often does happen in multidistrict litigations, but no guarantee.

Rob Rosenthal:

And, George, it seems like a lot of attorneys advertise that they can handle these cases. What do you recommend people look for when they're choosing an attorney to deal with their—in this case—their hip implant failure?

George McLaughlin:

Well, I have a personal bias there, I think you should pick an attorney that actually tries cases, not somebody that advertises and just assembles a bunch of cases and tries to settle the mass. I am one of the handful of attorneys around the country that has tried a hip case to verdict, and it was a case against Wright Medical in state court in California; we got a good result for our client after just a month-long trial.

Rob Rosenthal:

I know you've been involved in this particular type of case for, what, ten years now you've been doing these hip replacement cases?

George McLaughlin:

My first Profemur hip stem fracture literally walked in the door of my office, referred to me by another attorney and asked to see me without an appointment. I said, “What can I do for you?” He explained to me what happened. That was in the summer of 2010, and it was a Wright Medical Profemer hip stem fracture. I was one of the first to file a case, a lot of the first to really work it up, and that got me started. I started seeing more and more and more of these as a result. Here I am today, still doing them ten years later.

Rob Rosenthal:

If someone knows that they've got that Wright Medical device, and let's say hopefully they've had no issues yet, is it the kind of thing they have to wait until it breaks before they can do anything? What's your advice there?

George McLaughlin:

It's a problem. A lot of people don't know what kind of hip device they have. If you have an artificial hip, you should probably be seeing your orthopedic surgeon every few years for follow-up, but a lot of people don't. A lot of people just have great results, they have no pain, and they don't bother to go back and see their surgeon. A lot of people don't know what device they have; is it a metal bearing surface, is it polyethylene, a plastic lined hip, is it ceramic, they just don't know. And they don't know the manufacturer, is it Wright Medical or whatever other company out there it might be.

If you go to your orthopedic surgeon, you can ask them, “Hey, what kind of hardware do I have?” And if they tell you it's a Wright Medical, that's something you should look into because for many, many years, Wright Medical focused on these modular hips and the metal bearing surface hips, and both of those issues can be problems. But there is no way to know if this is going to break on you or not; there's no test that can be done that can warn you, “Hey, this is in the process of breaking.” You can't put enough radiation into a body to see into the hip stem.

But it's good to know if you have one of these, because if you do, if it's a modular titanium neck or even the cobalt chrome necks are now breaking, but if it's a Wright Medical Profemur Modular Hip System, you really need to know because you don't want to put yourself in a situation where if this broke you could be seriously harmed or even killed. You don't want to be climbing ladders if you've got a Wright Medical profemur hip in my opinion, because when you're up on the ladder, what if it breaks? You don't want to be out taking long walks in the woods or hunting by yourself, if your leg breaks and you can't get out, you're in a lick of trouble if you don't have a cell phone in contact. People that have them need to know so that they can just be careful and be aware, and if they hear a squeaking noise or a clicking noise in their hip... I've had a few of my clients that before it broke—a matter of days or so before it broke—they started hearing a clicking or squeaking, and that was a sign that it was about to fracture, and sure enough it broke a few days later.

Rob Rosenthal:

A fascinating topic. Very helpful information as usual, George. Thank you so much for answering our questions today.

George McLaughlin:

Well, thank you for having me. That's going to do it for this episode of Ask the Lawyer. My guest has been Colorado attorney George McLaughlin. Remember, if you want the best information, or you want to make sure you can choose a lawyer that lawyers choose, head over to askthelawyers.com. Thanks for watching. I'm Rob Rosenthal with AskTheLawyers™.

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