| February 2017 Sees Decline in Federal Personal Injury/Product Liability Suits |
| (04 Apr 2017)
The latest available data from the federal courts show that during February 2017 the government reported 1,972 new personal injury filings for product liability.
This number is down 28.1% over the previous month when the number of civil filings of this type totaled 2,744. While February's filings were unusually low, the average monthly filings so far during FY 2017 were 2,806 - down from the average filings of 3,268 during all of FY 2016. Civil filings for February 2017 are down 30.1 percent from levels reported five years ago based on case-by-case court records which were compiled and analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
While the overall volume of this litigation has declined, the health care and pharmaceuticals sector has seen an increase. During FY 2016, filings reached 20,287 suits, up from 7,457 filed during FY 2013. Already, during the first five months of FY 2017, filings of these types of cases have surpassed the total number that were brought during all of FY 2013 The Eastern District of Louisiana had the largest number of these suits during February where U.S District Judge Eldon E. Fallon is handling multidistrict litigation (MDL) involving the safety of Xarelto, a blood thinner developed by Johnson & Johnson's unit Janssen Pharmaceuticals and by Bayer. The Southern District of West Virginia had the second largest number of these suits. For further details on these national trends see: http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/civil/464/ Each month, TRAC offers a report focused on one area of civil litigation in the U.S. district courts. In addition, subscribers to the TRACFed data service can generate custom reports by district, office, nature of suit or federal jurisdiction. To start, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/interpreter?tab=civil If you want to be sure to receive notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at: http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1 or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/tracreports TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the US Federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl |
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