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>> BLAS:: If I have a transvaginal mesh case, will my case go to trial?
>> NATIONS:: Well, unlike the Christine Scott case which did go to trial in California, very,
very few cases will be tried, out of the tens of thousand of transvaginal mesh cases.
About five cases will be chosen for trials, and those cases may or may not be tried. But
if they are, they will be tried in West Virginia in the federal court there and the
likelihood that you are going to be one of those cases is about 1 out of 20,000 or so.
But the trial is not necessary for you to get the advantage of the MDL trials. Because
what happens is this, the huge advantage to the MDL for an individual plaintiff is two
things, number one, you cannot possibly afford to prosecute a case, a single case of your
own against the big manufacturers. They are spending millions and millions and millions
of dollars to defend these cases. They have teams of untold numbers of lawyers who are
reviewing millions of pages of documents right now to defend these cases. And for you to
trial and go to trial against them in a one single case, it would cost you more to
prosecute the case than the amount of your recovery. So what happens is when you join
together with thousands and thousands of other people, then at the end of the case the
judge says, okay 1% of your recovery or 2% of your recovery, whatever the judge decides,
will be taken out to go to pay those common expenses. So 1% of your recovery is a very
nominal sum to pay to sue a large manufacturer. So that helps you considerably to
prosecute your case. And you get the advantage of all the people putting together all
their money and all their expenses and all their lawyers and putting it together into a
plaintiffs' steering committee, and doing all the work and reviewing all these millions
of pages of documents, hiring and retaining and preparing experts and presenting experts.
All that is paid for cooperatively by all of the plaintiffs, but you get the advantage of
every single bit of it in your individual case. The plaintiffs' steering committee is in
the business of establishing liability on each of the individual defendants, on each of
the devices, regardless of when they were revised, when the new warnings came out. That's
why this is so complicated, but that is the job of the plaintiffs' steering committee, is
to establish that liability. Now, here is the second big advantage to you in an MDL: we
will handle your case in the MDL, but when it comes time to talk about settling your
case, to mediate your case, we will prepare your case individually, we will negotiate it
individually, and we will settle it individually even though we have thousands of
clients. The thousands of clients is a huge benefit to you because there is definitely
strength in numbers. So the more cases I have, the stronger the docket I have, the more
credibility I have, and the more the defense bar has to deal with me and with your case.
So, in the mediation process, we will review your case, we will get your medical records,
we will prepare your case individually, we will have it reviewed by a medical team, we
will then negotiate it and we will settle it. If it doesn't settle then, if we don't get
settled in the MDL, which is most unlikely because the whole purpose of the MDL is to
resolve these cases, but if it doesn't get settled in the MDL, we will come back and we
will try your case. We are perfectly capable of trying these cases. We've been doing it
for years with considerable success.