Medtronic Recall Costing Medtronic Millions

The recall of Medtronic's Sprint Fidelis leads is costing Medtronic millions of dollars already. The obvious and immediate cost to the company is due to the fact that medical professionals and the public will lose confidence in the company and stop using their products. It has been reported that the October 15 recall has already had a negative impact on sales of $130 Million Dollars. When heart patients and cardiologists lose confidence in the Medtronic product, they will look at competing products and/or consider foregoing getting a defibrillator.

There will also likely have to be payouts to the thousands of patients who have the defective leads implanted in their heart. We are representing these claimants in these claims against Medtronic. Although the payouts will not occur in 2007, Medtronic and its shareholders are well aware that these payouts will need to be made in the near future. Furthermore, legal fees and attorney fees are already being incurred by Medtronic. Individual Personal Injury Lawsuits have already been filed in Minneapolis and Puerto Rico. There will likely be class action consumer fraud lawsuits as well. A shareholder lawsuit has been filed against Medtronic for witholding information regarding the defects in the United States District Court for Minneapolis.

It seems that Medtronic may have known that the leads were defective well before the October 15, 2007 recall was announced. If this is true, then its deplorable that Medtronic continued to allow doctors to implant the device into patients. The good news is that the legal process will allow us to get to the bottom of what Medtronic knew and when they knew it. The civil justice system allows for discovery of this information through exchange of documents, interrogatories and depositions. The lawyers at Goldberg, Finnegan & Mester will fight to make sure that patients injured as a result of having a defective defibrillator are treated fairly and are adequately compensated for their injuries.