| Veterans Personal Injury Suits Alleging Defective 3M Earplugs Skyrocket |
| (23 Mar 2020)
The latest available data from the federal courts show that during February 2020 there was a 78.5 percent jump in the number of all types of civil lawsuits filed as compared to December 2019. New civil lawsuits in February totaled 39,142. This represented the second highest monthly total for federal civil court filings over the last decade.
By comparison, during all of FY 2019 new civil suits averaged just 24,735 per month.
This jump in February was largely the result of a surge of lawsuits filed by thousands of veterans claiming that they had suffered hearing loss and other hearing-related problems as a result of defective 3M supplied earplugs. These suits are classified as "personal injury - product liability" cases in the federal court data. The veterans' suits claimed that 3M knew these earplugs had defects but sold them to the Army anyway without disclosing this information to the Army or warning the public. According to the case-by-case information on federal civil lawsuits analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, nearly half (47.5%) of all federal civil litigation filed during February involved product liability personal injury matters. During February 2020 there were a total of 18,600 such suits filed with the vast majority of them involving these veteran suits. When monthly 2020 civil filings of this type are compared with those of the same period in the previous year, their number was up by 488 percent. To read the full report go to: https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/civil/599/ 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 with data updated through February 2019. To start, go to: https://trac.syr.edu/interpreter?tab=civil If you want to be sure to receive notification whenever updated data become available, sign up at: https://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1 Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tracreports or like us on Facebook: https://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: https://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl |
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