If you've been diagnosed with any type of injury after regularly using 3M Dual-Ended Combat Arms Earplugs, you should talk to a lawyer about a potential product liability lawsuit against 3M. Lawyers for some 3M plaintiffs have said that they will challenge the bankruptcy maneuver.įor more details, check out: 3M Combat Earplugs Lawsuits: History and Developments. 3M promised to fund a $1 billion trust that would pay service members who are suing over the earplugs. In late July 2022, 3M announced that Aearo Technologies, the unit that made 3M's combat earplugs, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in an effort to resolve the hundreds of thousands of earplug lawsuits.
The judge overseeing the 3M MDL ordered attorneys from both sides to begin settlement discussions by mid-July 2022. Plaintiffs have been awarded nearly $300 million combined. In 16 bellwether trials, plaintiffs have won ten times and 3M has won six times. If the parties don't reach a global settlement, individual cases are sent back to where they were originally filed for trial.Īs of June 2022, juries have split in the 3M earplug bellwether trials. The bellwether trials often give the parties the information they need to reach an agreement to settle all MDL cases.
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Bellwether trials are cases chosen by the judge and parties to go to trial first because they represent the most common legal issues in the MDL.
The goal of MDL is to streamline pre-trial procedures (like discovery) and encourage settlement through the use of "bellwether" trials.
Consumer fraud cases are often class actions.Īn MDL is a better fit for personal injury lawsuits that share common issues, like 3M earplug lawsuits. A class action is one lawsuit filed on behalf of a large group of people who suffered uniform, mostly financial harm. 2885.Īn MDL is a group of lawsuits based on similar facts. Most of the 3M lawsuits have been transferred to the Northern District of Florida in the largest mass tort " multi-district litigation" (MDL) in history-officially called 3M Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. The whistleblower settlement opened the door to over 270,000 service members ("plaintiffs") filing personal injury lawsuits against 3M. 3M eventually agreed to pay the United States $9.1 million to settle the claim. The whistleblower said that 3M knowingly sold defective earplugs to the United States military. The explosion of 3M civil lawsuits started with a whistleblower claim filed by a competitor of 3M under the False Claims Act in 2016.