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Larry Patterson went in for a routine hernia repair. He came out, eventually, with several inches of his bowel removed.

Timothy O’Brien, board-certified trial attorney and shareholder at Levin Papantonio, just won $88 million for Patterson and his wife Tammy against Covidien, a Medtronic company. It is the largest compensatory award in fifteen years of mesh litigation, and the first of roughly 2,500 cases to reach a jury. The mesh, Symbotex, sits right against your intestines behind a collagen barrier meant to last 30 days. Covidien’s own internal testing showed it was gone in under seven. They knew in 2003.

O’Brien walks Gregg through the evidence that turned the trial, where sales staff swore to doctors the barrier lasted a month while R&D said otherwise in writing. He also maps the hernia mesh lawsuit landscape, from the Bard settlement covering 33,000 claimants to why Medtronic Covidien is the last major manufacturer still fighting, and what a bellwether verdict actually means for the thousands of people still waiting on their own cases

 

Join Gregg and Timothy O’Brien on Climate Change Environment Science & the Law as they explore:  

What You’ll Learn

  • Why a generation of surgeons stopped doing tissue-to-tissue repair, and what that traded away

  • How Symbotex’s protective barrier was supposed to work, and how fast it actually disappeared

  • The 2003 document that locked in the depositions and became the case’s spine

  • Why sales and R&D were telling two completely different stories about the same product

  • What a bellwether trial is, and why the first one carries the most weight

  • Where the Bard, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic Covidien litigations stand right now

  • Why about 100 new Covidien cases are still being filed every month

  • What Covidien’s planned appeal means for people still waiting

  • How to find out if you or someone you love has a case

 

Time Stamps

0:00 – «They are lying»: the sales pitch vs. the truth 0:48 – Meet attorney Timothy O’Brien 1:02 – The hernia mesh «safety feature» that failed 2:06 – Why hernia mesh exists in the first place 4:13 – The Patterson case: what happened to the plaintiff 5:41 – The depositions that exposed Covidien 7:46 – 2003: when they allegedly knew the truth 9:33 – The 3 major mesh manufacturers, explained 11:59 – What a «bellwether trial» means for your case 14:07 – Will Covidien settle or appeal? 17:40 – How to contact Timothy O’Brien about your case

 

Timothy O’Brien is a board-certified trial attorney and shareholder at Levin Papantonio, where he has served as lead or co-lead counsel in mass tort litigation against major hernia mesh manufacturers, including Bard, Johnson & Johnson, and Medtronic Covidien. He recently helped secure an $88 million verdict in the first bellwether trial of the Covidien hernia mesh multidistrict litigation. 

 

Contact / Follow Timothy O’Brien: 

Firm: Levin Papantonio 

Website: https://levinlaw.com  

 

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