Looper v. Cook Inc., No. 20-3103 (7th Cir. 2021)
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The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) asked the Southern District of Indiana to oversee a multidistrict litigation docket to coordinate discovery and other pretrial proceedings in thousands of medical product-liability suits, alleging that Cook’s inferior vena cava (IVC) filters were defective. The court and the parties agreed to a procedure by which new plaintiffs could join the MDL by filing directly in the Southern District of Indiana rather than filing in their home districts and waiting for the judiciary’s administrative machinery to transfer their cases to the MDL in Indiana. The plaintiffs filed their lawsuits directly in the Indiana MDL rather than filing in the states where they lived and had their IVC filters implanted.
Cook moved to dismiss both cases based on Indiana’s two-year statute of limitations for personal injury actions. The plaintiffs’ home states (South Carolina and Mississippi) have three-year statutes. The Seventh Circuit reversed the dismissal of the suits. The unique facts of this case indicate that Cook implicitly consented to using choice-of-law rules for these plaintiffs as if they had filed in their home states. It was not fair to allow Cook to change positions retroactively to dismiss these plaintiffs’ cases that had been timely filed under the “law of the case.”
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