Legal analysts believe that due to the lawsuits currently filed against DePuy for harm suffered from the Pinnacle as well as those which are likely to come later, Johnson & Johnson—DePuy’s parent company—could be liable for billions of dollars in damages. The federal Pinnacle cases have been consolidated in an MDL in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas under Judge James Kinkeade. While depositions for these federal Pinnacle cases began in January, 2013, the first trial is not scheduled until March, 2014.

With such disparate outcomes between the two cases, it is difficult to predict the future of the nearly 11,000 cases left to try. District Judge David Katz is presiding over more than 7,000 federal ASR lawsuits which have been consolidated into an MDL in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. More than 2,000 are scheduled for California state court and 500 are in the state court in Illinois with the remainder scattered in state courts around the U.S.

There are different statutes of limitations—time limits within which a lawsuit must be filed—from one state to the next. Failure to file a transvaginal mesh lawsuit within the statutes of the state the injured person resides in could potentially bar recovery for claims related to yet another dangerous, substandard medical device. In most cases the statute of limitations begins to run from July, 2011 when the FDA announced there were risks of complications associated with the vaginal mesh when used for pelvic organ prolapse. Some of these complications include mesh erosion, chronic pelvic pain, infection, organ perforation, painful sexual intercourse and incontinence.