Abbott and Nevro Spinal Cord Stimulator MDLs Created: Chicago for Abbott, Oakland for Nevro

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) created two new spinal cord stimulator MDLs on October 2, 2026: federal Abbott cases are now consolidated as MDL No. 3194 before Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins in the Northern District of Illinois, and federal Nevro cases as MDL No. 3195 before Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. in the Northern District of California. The Abbott Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDL decisions give roughly 50 pending federal device-injury suits a single address per manufacturer, but they also split the category across three judges, because the Panel declined the petitioners' request to send both dockets to Judge Josephine L. Staton, who already runs the Boston Scientific MDL in Los Angeles.

That second point is the one the early coverage passes over. The plaintiffs who brought both petitions in June wanted a single courthouse for the spinal cord stimulator litigation, even if the Panel insisted on separate dockets. They got the separate dockets and lost the single courthouse. What follows explains what the Panel ordered, who the judges are, how the case counts reconcile, what happens to cases that were already moving, and what the new structure means for claimants, for Abbott and Nevro, and for the firms and funders carrying spinal cord stimulator inventories.

Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDLs: what the JPML ordered on October 2, 2026

The Panel heard oral argument on both petitions in Chicago on September 24, 2026, at the session it held at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Eight days later it issued two separate transfer orders, one per manufacturer, rather than a combined ruling. Both orders granted centralization over the manufacturers' opposition.

The operative findings track the statute. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1407, the Panel may transfer civil actions "involving one or more common questions of fact" that are "pending in different districts" if transfer "will be for the convenience of parties and witnesses and will promote the just and efficient conduct of such actions." According to reporting on the orders, the Panel found both conditions met for each manufacturer's cases taken separately: the Abbott actions share factual questions about the design, testing, and warnings for Abbott's stimulator systems, and the Nevro actions share the same questions about Nevro's.

Item	Abbott	Nevro
MDL number	3194	3195
Order date	October 2, 2026	October 2, 2026
Transferee court	Northern District of Illinois (Chicago)	Northern District of California (Oakland)
Transferee judge	Lindsay C. Jenkins	Haywood S. Gilliam Jr.
Forum petitioners requested	Central District of California	Central District of California, before Judge Staton
Actions on the June motion	15 actions, seven districts	17 actions, six districts
Federal suits reported at the order	26 suits in 13 districts	23 claims in 10 districts
Defendant's position	Opposed centralization	Opposed centralization

The count rows in that table are not contradictory. They are snapshots taken at different times. A Section 1407 motion lists the actions pending on the day it is filed; by the time the Panel rules, more cases have usually been filed and noticed as potential tag-alongs. The Abbott motion listed 15 actions when it was filed on June 22, 2026; HarrisMartin reported that the Abbott order transferred 15 actions, which is consistent with the Panel transferring the scheduled actions and leaving later-filed cases to follow by conditional transfer order. Bloomberg Law's figures of 26 Abbott suits across 13 districts and 23 Nevro claims across 10 districts describe the wider federal inventory at the time of the order.

The two orders arrived the same day the Panel sent the Apple AirTag stalking cases to Judge Noël Wise as MDL No. 3199, also in the Northern District of California. The Northern District of California therefore picked up two new MDLs from a single hearing session.

Are Abbott spinal cord stimulator lawsuits in an MDL?

Yes. As of October 2, 2026, federal Abbott spinal cord stimulator lawsuits are centralized in MDL No. 3194 before Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins in the Northern District of Illinois, which sits in Chicago.

The Abbott litigation targets the company's neuromodulation line, principally the Proclaim family of implantable pulse generators (including Proclaim XR and Proclaim DRG variants) and the rechargeable Eterna platform. Complaints in the docket allege painful electric shocks, burns, rapid battery failure, lead migration, and loss of therapeutic effect, often ending in revision or explant surgery. A recurring theory in the Abbott filings is that the company brought modified devices to market through premarket approval supplements without the testing that a materially changed device warranted, and without adequate warnings to physicians and patients. Some complaints add allegations about company representatives programming or adjusting devices after implantation.

The Northern District of Illinois was always a plausible landing place for Abbott. The company is headquartered in Abbott Park, Illinois, inside that district, so its corporate witnesses and documents are there. It was also the district that defeated the first Abbott request: when the Panel refused an industry-wide MDL in June, it noted that the Abbott actions then before it were all pending in the Northern District of Illinois, leaving nothing to gather from other districts. The second petition fixed that problem by pointing to cases in seven districts, and the inventory has since spread to about 13.

Judge Jenkins joined the Northern District of Illinois in 2023. MDL No. 3194 is a fresh assignment, and the first orders in the docket will set its tempo.

Who is the judge in the Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDL?

Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. of the Northern District of California presides over the Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDL, No. 3195, under the Panel's October 2, 2026 order. Judge Gilliam has served on that court since 2014 and sits in Oakland.

The Nevro cases concern the Senza family of systems and the 10 kHz high-frequency therapy Nevro markets as HFX. Plaintiffs allege lead migration and fracture, shocks and unwanted stimulation, battery and charging failures, and revision surgery. Nevro is headquartered in Redwood City, California, which is in the Northern District of California, and since 2025 it has been owned by Globus Medical. The Panel's choice therefore puts the Nevro litigation in the defendant's home district rather than in the Los Angeles court the petitioners asked for.

Nevro opposed centralization in an August 6, 2026 filing, arguing that the claims did not share enough common questions about defect and injury to justify coordinated proceedings. The Panel disagreed. Its reasoning follows the pattern it has applied in device litigation for years: a single defendant, a single product family, and a single design and regulatory file supply the common factual core, and the variation in failure modes and injuries is something for the transferee judge to manage, not a reason to leave the cases scattered.

Why didn't the JPML send the Abbott and Nevro cases to Judge Staton?

The full reasoning on forum selection could not be reviewed for this article, but the outcome is clear: neither manufacturer's cases were sent to the Central District of California, and each went instead to the district containing the defendant's headquarters. That result fits the Panel's June ruling, which treated each manufacturer's litigation as a separate factual universe.

The petitioners' pitch for Los Angeles was efficiency of judicial learning. Judge Staton has run MDL No. 3181, In re Boston Scientific Corporation Spinal Cord Stimulator Products Liability Litigation, since the Panel created it on June 5, 2026. By late August she had held an initial scheduling conference, appointed 19 attorneys to plaintiffs' leadership, and entered a direct-filing order. A judge who has already absorbed the clinical vocabulary of neuromodulation, the device architecture, and the regulatory framework could, on that argument, run a second and third docket faster than a judge starting from nothing.

Three features of the Panel's own reasoning cut the other way.

First, the Panel's June order rejected industry-wide centralization precisely because Boston Scientific, Abbott, Nevro and Medtronic sell different devices, carry different regulatory histories, and were not alleged to have acted together. Assigning all three dockets to one judge would not formally merge them, but it would rebuild in practice much of the coordination the Panel had just declined to order.

Second, the Panel weighs where the evidence and witnesses are. For a single-defendant device MDL, the defendant's headquarters is where the design history files, complaint-handling records, regulatory correspondence, and corporate witnesses sit. Chicago for Abbott and the Bay Area for Nevro both put the transferee court near that evidence.

Third, the Panel spreads MDL assignments across judges and districts and pays attention to the load a transferee judge already carries. Handing one judge three device dockets at once would concentrate work in a way the Panel generally avoids.

The practical consequence is that there is no single spinal cord stimulator judge. Three courts will make their own rulings on pleading sufficiency, preemption, discovery scope, Plaintiff Fact Sheet (PFS) content, and Bellwether Trial selection, and those rulings can diverge.

How many Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator lawsuits are pending?

About 49 federal lawsuits were pending against the two companies when the Panel ruled: Bloomberg Law counted 26 Abbott suits in 13 federal districts and 23 Nevro claims in 10 districts. With the 29 Boston Scientific actions in MDL No. 3181 on the September 2026 pending-MDL report, the three dockets together held roughly 78 federal cases at creation.

Those are small numbers for a Mass Tort. The Panel has centralized smaller groups before; it created MDL No. 3181 on 23 actions. But the small counts show how early this litigation still is. The adverse-event history for these devices is far larger: the Associated Press reported more than 80,000 injury reports to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for spinal cord stimulators between 2008 and 2018. Filed federal suits and reported device events are different populations, and a decade of reports does not translate into a decade of claims.

Expect the numbers to rise. Creating an MDL usually triggers filings: firms that had held cases back while the forum was uncertain now know where those cases will land, and a transferee court that enters a direct-filing order removes the cost of filing in a home district and waiting for transfer.

Three manufacturers, three courts: the spinal cord stimulator MDL map

The structure the Panel has built since June 2026 now looks like this.

Manufacturer	Principal devices at issue	MDL	Court	Judge	Status, October 6, 2026
Boston Scientific	Precision, WaveWriter, WaveWriter Alpha	No. 3181	C.D. Cal. (Los Angeles)	Josephine L. Staton	Created June 5, 2026; 29 actions on September report; leadership appointed; direct filing permitted
Abbott	Proclaim family, Eterna	No. 3194	N.D. Ill. (Chicago)	Lindsay C. Jenkins	Created October 2, 2026; about 26 suits in 13 districts reported
Nevro (Globus Medical)	Senza, HF10/HFX	No. 3195	N.D. Cal. (Oakland)	Haywood S. Gilliam Jr.	Created October 2, 2026; about 23 claims in 10 districts reported
Medtronic	Various neuromodulation systems	None	Dispersed	Various	No MDL and no pending petition reported

The table shows the asymmetry that will shape claim values for the next two years. A Boston Scientific claimant enters a docket four months ahead of the others, with leadership in place. An Abbott or Nevro claimant enters a docket that exists on paper but has no leadership, no case management order, and no discovery plan yet. A Medtronic claimant has none of that structure.

What the plaintiffs allege against Abbott and Nevro

The injury allegations are similar across both new dockets, and they are the same ones that made the plaintiffs' bar treat spinal cord stimulators as one category in February.

A spinal cord stimulator is an implanted neuromodulation system: a pulse generator placed under the skin, connected to electrode leads threaded into the epidural space, delivering electrical pulses meant to interrupt pain signaling. Patients usually reach the device after other treatment has failed, often after unsuccessful spine surgery. Most systems are trialed temporarily before permanent implantation, and many are rechargeable.

The alleged failures fall into a few groups:

• Lead migration and fracture. Leads move from their implanted position or break, causing loss of therapy, stimulation in the wrong place, or the need for surgical repositioning.
• Shocks, burns and uncontrolled stimulation. Plaintiffs describe painful jolts, overstimulation, and burns at the generator or charging site.
• Battery and charging failures. Rechargeable systems that lose capacity quickly or fail to charge, forcing early replacement surgery.
• Nerve injury. Allegations range from numbness and weakness to more serious neurological harm.
• Revision and explant surgery. The most common and best-documented injury: a second or third operation to repair or remove the device, often followed by a return to the pain state and to the opioid therapy the device was meant to replace.

The legal theories are the standard device trio. Design Defect claims attack lead anchoring, connector architecture, battery and charging design, and firmware. Failure to Warn claims attack what the labeling and physician materials said about migration, shock, and battery risks. Manufacturing defect and negligence claims fill the gaps. Overlaying all of them is the allegation, prominent in the Abbott filings and present in the Nevro cases, that incremental device changes were approved through premarket approval supplements without testing that matched the changes.

That allegation matters for more than liability. It sets up the defense that will decide how much of this litigation survives.

Preemption will be decided three times

Spinal cord stimulators are Class III devices approved through the FDA's premarket approval pathway, and that pathway carries the strongest federal defense in device law. In Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., 552 U.S. 312 (2008), the Supreme Court held that the Medical Device Amendments expressly preempt state-law claims that would impose requirements "different from, or in addition to" the federal requirements applicable to a premarket-approved device. What survives Riegel is mainly the parallel claim: an allegation that the manufacturer violated a federal requirement in a way that also breaches a state-law duty.

Preemption (Products) is therefore the first serious motion in every spinal cord stimulator docket, and with three dockets it will be briefed and decided three times. Judge Staton, Judge Jenkins and Judge Gilliam will each rule on a master complaint drafted against a different device file. Each ruling will be persuasive authority in the other two courts but binding in none, and appeals would go to three different circuits: the Ninth Circuit from Los Angeles and Oakland, and the Seventh Circuit from Chicago.

The plaintiffs have already won one round of this argument outside any MDL. In DiToto v. Nevro Corporation, No. 1:25-cv-01388 (D. Md.), Senior Judge Richard D. Bennett on May 21, 2026 rejected most of Nevro's preemption motion and let eight of nine counts go forward on a parallel-claim theory. That ruling does not bind Judge Gilliam, but it is the most developed preemption decision in the Nevro litigation so far, and the plaintiffs' leadership will rely on it.

The premarket approval supplement allegation is how plaintiffs will try to get past Riegel. If a modified device reached the market on a supplement that never evaluated the modified feature, plaintiffs will argue that the approval does not impose federal requirements covering that feature, or that a failure to report or test violated federal requirements that a state duty parallels. Whether that works turns on the actual regulatory history of each device generation, and that history is specific to each manufacturer. That is why manufacturer-specific dockets make sense, and also why three different judges could reach three different answers.

What happens to cases already moving, including DiToto v. Nevro

Centralization moves cases to the transferee court for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings. It does not merge them into a class action, and it does not change the governing law of individual claims. Several mechanics follow from the October 2 orders.

Scheduled actions transfer now. The actions listed in each order's schedule move to the transferee court when the order is filed with the transferee clerk. Pending motions in those cases, including undecided motions to dismiss, go with them and will usually be overtaken by the transferee judge's master pleading schedule.

Later cases follow by conditional transfer order. Spinal cord stimulator suits against Abbott or Nevro filed in other districts are tag-along actions. The Panel's clerk issues a conditional transfer order, and unless a party objects within the period set by the Panel's rules, the case moves. A plaintiff who wants to stay out of the MDL has to object and show that the case does not share the common questions, which is hard to do in a single-defendant device docket.

Direct filing comes later, if at all. Neither new court has entered a direct-filing order yet. Judge Staton entered one in MDL No. 3181 about two to three months after transfer. Until Judge Jenkins or Judge Gilliam does the same, new Abbott and Nevro cases must be filed in a proper home district and tagged.

Advanced cases face a hard choice. DiToto is the clearest example. On September 18, 2026, six days before the Panel hearing, Judge Bennett refused to stay the case pending a transfer decision, reasoning that it could reach trial within about a year. If DiToto is among the Nevro actions now subject to transfer, its trial path in Maryland will give way to the MDL's common schedule. A party can ask the Panel to exclude or separately remand an advanced action, but the Panel rarely carves a case out of a single-defendant docket at the start. Which actions each order's schedule actually covers should be confirmed from the order itself.

Remand for trial remains the endpoint. Under Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26 (1998), a transferee court cannot try a transferred case without the parties' consent. Cases that do not settle or end on pretrial motions go back to their home districts for trial. In practice, the shape of any Bellwether Trial program will depend on whether the parties agree to Lexecon waivers or on the volume of cases filed directly into each district.

Is Medtronic part of a spinal cord stimulator MDL?

No. Medtronic spinal cord stimulator claims are not in any MDL, and no petition to centralize them has been reported. Medtronic was one of the manufacturers swept into the February 2026 industry-wide motion that the Panel rejected in June, and nobody followed up with a Medtronic-only petition, as the Abbott and Nevro plaintiffs did.

The October 2 orders show how to get one. The Panel will centralize a single manufacturer's spinal cord stimulator cases if they are spread across enough districts to make coordination worthwhile. A Medtronic petition would need enough filed federal actions in several districts to clear that bar. Until then, Medtronic claimants litigate one case at a time, with the filing firm carrying the full cost of product identification, regulatory discovery, expert work on General Causation and Specific Causation, and the preemption fight.

What happens next in the Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDLs?

The next 90 days in each new docket will probably follow the usual early-MDL sequence, and MDL No. 3181 gives a rough guide to the timing.

Step	MDL 3181 (Boston Scientific) actual	Expected in MDLs 3194 and 3195
Transfer order	June 5, 2026	October 2, 2026
Initial case management or scheduling conference	August 5, 2026 (about 2 months)	Roughly November to December 2026
Plaintiffs' leadership appointed	August 13, 2026 (19 attorneys)	Roughly December 2026 to January 2027
Direct-filing order	Late August 2026	Likely within the first three months
Master complaint and preemption motion	Pending	Early 2027
Plaintiff and defendant fact sheets	Pending	Early 2027
Bellwether selection	Not yet scheduled	Not before late 2027 at the earliest

The expected dates are projections from the Boston Scientific timeline and ordinary MDL practice, not court orders. Each transferee judge sets the actual schedule.

Several early decisions will matter more than their procedural labels suggest:

• Leadership size and composition. Judge Staton appointed 19 attorneys. A small MDL with a large leadership structure means a heavy common-benefit load spread over few cases.
• Common Benefit Fund assessment. The percentage set early in each docket will apply to every later recovery, including from firms that join late.
• Fact-sheet design. A detailed Plaintiff Fact Sheet with early implant, revision, and device-identification records will filter weak claims quickly. Product identification is a real issue for patients who had more than one system or a trial device from a different manufacturer.
• Sequencing of preemption. If either judge decides preemption on a master complaint before discovery, the docket's value can change sharply in one ruling. If preemption is deferred until after core regulatory discovery, the litigation will run longer and cost more on both sides.

What it means for plaintiffs' firms, Abbott and Nevro, and funders

For plaintiffs' firms. A claim's value now depends on which device was implanted. An Abbott or Nevro claim has moved from the scattered category into a docket that will soon have leadership, a common discovery record, and eventually a bellwether path, which tends to support claim values and settlement likelihood. A mixed-brand inventory is now three or four separate litigations, each with its own timetable, leadership politics, common-benefit assessment, and preemption risk. Firms that marketed spinal cord stimulator claims as one category will need to sort their dockets by manufacturer and device generation, and should check the Statute of Limitations on every claim rather than waiting for a direct-filing order.

For Abbott and Nevro. Losing the centralization fight has a benefit: each company now litigates on its home ground, before one judge, with one set of corporate witnesses deposed once. The cost is that a single adverse preemption or Daubert Challenge ruling now applies across the whole federal inventory instead of to one case. Nevro, whose first sizeable preemption loss came in DiToto, will try to get Judge Gilliam to address the issue on a fuller record. Abbott starts with a cleaner slate in Chicago.

For Boston Scientific. The October orders confirm that Boston Scientific will not share a judge with its competitors. Its docket stays four months ahead and will produce the first rulings on preemption, fact sheets, and bellwether design, which will be the template, and the target, for briefing in Chicago and Oakland.

For funders. Third-Party Litigation Funding priced on the spinal cord stimulator category as a whole needs repricing by manufacturer. Timing differs by docket, and the preemption risk, while legally the same question, will be decided by three different judges on three different regulatory records. That splits a correlated risk into three partly independent ones, which helps diversification only if the rulings diverge. A uniform defense win across the three courts would still sink every position.

For patients. None of this produces money quickly. No spinal cord stimulator case has been tried to verdict, no manufacturer has announced a settlement program, and no Settlement Matrix exists. Any per-claim settlement figure circulating online is an estimate, not a data point.

Frequently asked questions

What did the JPML decide about Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator lawsuits?

On October 2, 2026, the Panel created two separate MDLs. Abbott cases go to MDL No. 3194 before Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins in the Northern District of Illinois, and Nevro cases go to MDL No. 3195 before Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. in the Northern District of California.

Why didn't the JPML send the Abbott and Nevro cases to Judge Staton?

The Panel sent each manufacturer's cases to the district where that company is headquartered instead of the Central District of California the petitioners requested. That is consistent with its June 2026 finding that each manufacturer's devices, regulatory history, and evidence are distinct, so there are now three spinal cord stimulator judges rather than one.

How many Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator lawsuits are pending?

Bloomberg Law reported 26 federal Abbott suits in 13 districts and 23 Nevro claims in 10 districts when the orders issued. The June motions had listed 15 Abbott actions in seven districts and 17 Nevro actions in six; the totals are expected to grow now that both dockets exist.

Is Medtronic part of a spinal cord stimulator MDL?

No. Medtronic claims are not centralized, and no Medtronic-only petition has been reported. They continue individually in the districts where they were filed.

Is there a spinal cord stimulator settlement?

No. As of October 6, 2026, no manufacturer has announced a settlement program and no spinal cord stimulator case has reached a jury verdict in any of the three MDLs.

Can I still file an Abbott or Nevro spinal cord stimulator lawsuit?

Yes, subject to the Statute of Limitations in the patient's state. Until the transferee courts enter direct-filing orders, new federal cases are filed in a proper home district and then transferred into the MDL as tag-along actions. This article is analysis, not legal advice, and individual deadlines should be checked with counsel.