Bard PowerPort Verdict: Jury Clears Bard in Lattanzio Infection Bellwether, Scorecard Now 2-1

A federal jury in Phoenix returned a defense verdict for C.R. Bard and its parent Becton Dickinson on October 30, 2026 in Lattanzio v. Becton Dickinson, the third bellwether trial in the Bard PowerPort litigation, MDL 3081. The Bard PowerPort verdict matters because Lattanzio was the second infection case to reach a jury and the second to end without a plaintiff award: infection claims are now 0-2 at trial, the scorecard reads 2-1 for the defense, and the $40 million Divelbliss fracture award is the only plaintiff win in a docket of more than 4,000 cases.

That one sentence is most of what the first reports said. Law.com's piece, syndicated elsewhere the same day, reported that the Arizona jury sided with Bard in the third bellwether; it did not publish the verdict form, the vote, or the questions the jury answered. What the reporting does not say, and what practitioners holding Bard PowerPort inventory need, is what the result does to the two halves of this litigation, why an infection case lost after a pretrial ruling that much of the coverage described as a warning finding against Bard, and what has to happen before the next trial on December 1.

What happened in the Bard PowerPort verdict on October 30?

The jury in the third Bard PowerPort bellwether found for the defense. The case is Lattanzio v. Becton Dickinson and Company, No. 2:24-cv-00680-PHX-DGC, a member case of In re Bard Implanted Port Catheter Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3081, in the District of Arizona. Judge David G. Campbell, who has presided over the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) since the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) centralized it in August 2023, had set the trial for an October 13 to October 30 window under a case management order. The verdict arrived on the last day of that window.

The plaintiff, May Lattanzio of Florida, received her implanted port in August 2013. Her theory followed the infection track that runs through the whole docket: that the catheter's surface, degraded by the barium sulfate compounded into its polyurethane, gave bacteria a place to colonize, and that colonization produced a catheter-related bloodstream infection and sepsis. Her pleaded claims, as narrowed by the pretrial rulings, were Design Defect, Failure to Warn, misrepresentation and concealment, and Punitive Damages.

The trial was bifurcated by agreement. The jury was to decide liability and compensatory damages first, and to hear a separate punitive phase only if it found for the plaintiff. On the reported outcome, that second phase never opened. No compensatory figure was awarded and no punitive question was reached.

Law.com described the result as Bard's second win at trial over the PowerPort, counting the May 2026 Cook verdict as the first. That characterization is accurate on the claims the Cook jury decided, though Cook also ended with a deadlock on design defect, a distinction that matters below. As of publication, no claim-by-claim breakdown of the Lattanzio verdict form had been reported, and this article does not guess at one.

The Bard PowerPort bellwether scorecard after three trials

Three Bellwether Trials have now gone to a jury in MDL 3081 in a little over six months. Read side by side, they divide cleanly along the injury line.

Trial	Case	Injury theory	Trial dates	Outcome
1st bellwether	Cook v. Becton Dickinson	Port infection, 2022; device removed; chemotherapy interrupted	Opened April 21, 2026; verdict May 2026	Defense verdict on failure to warn, failure to instruct and consumer fraud; jury hung on design defect
2nd bellwether	Divelbliss v. Becton Dickinson	Catheter fracture; fragment migrated to the heart	Opened August 18, 2026; verdict September 4, 2026	Plaintiff verdict, $40,000,000 compensatory; no manufacturing defect, no fraudulent concealment, no punitive damages; judgment entered September 10, 2026
3rd bellwether	Lattanzio v. Becton Dickinson	Bloodstream infection after August 2013 implant	October 13 to October 30, 2026	Defense verdict reported October 30, 2026; bifurcated punitive phase not reached
4th bellwether	Hicks v. Bard	Reported as a thrombosis case	Set for December 1 to December 18, 2026	Pending
5th bellwether	Sorensen v. Bard	Not yet publicly characterized	Set for February 2 to February 19, 2027	Pending

The fracture case won. Both infection cases lost. That pattern is what the October verdict actually adds, and it is a more useful piece of information than the bare 2-1 tally, because a 2-1 record built on one fracture win and two infection losses describes a different litigation than a 2-1 record spread randomly across injury types.

Why did Bard win the third PowerPort bellwether?

The honest answer is that the jury's reasons are not public, and the verdict form has not been reported. What can be said is which arguments were in play, and which of them the record suggests carried weight.

Before trial, Bard's defense was reported to rest on alternative causation: that Lattanzio's infection traced to something other than the device itself, such as implantation technique, catheter care and access practices, or her individual medical history. That is the standard defense in any vascular-access infection case, and it is a strong one for a structural reason that has nothing to do with this particular plaintiff.

Infection has a Specific Causation problem that fracture does not. A catheter fragment lodged in a heart chamber is self-proving: no one disputes where it came from or what it did. A bloodstream infection in a patient with an indwelling port has to be attributed to the device's surface rather than to skin flora introduced at access, to hospital or home-care handling, or to the patient's own immune status. Every one of those alternative pathways is clinically real and is documented in the literature on central-line infections. A plaintiff in an infection case therefore has to prove not only that the device was defective but that the defect, rather than any of several ordinary routes of infection, caused this infection. Two juries have now been asked to make that inference, and neither did.

The second factor is the Learned Intermediary Doctrine. Because a PowerPort is prescribed and implanted by a physician, a warning claim is measured by what the implanting clinician knew and would have done differently. Infection at a vascular access site is a disclosed and widely understood risk of any implanted port, and oncologists and interventional radiologists counsel patients about it as a matter of routine. A failure-to-warn theory has to persuade a jury that a physician who already knew ports can become infected would have chosen a different device, or managed this one differently, had the label said more. The Cook jury rejected that proposition outright. The Lattanzio jury, on the reported outcome, did not accept it either.

The third factor is time. An August 2013 implant put a long gap between placement and the injury and suit, and long gaps make causation harder, because they multiply the number of access events, dressing changes and clinical encounters any one of which could have introduced bacteria. They also raise the Statute of Limitations and Discovery Rule questions that Bard pressed before trial, discussed below.

Did the judge rule the PowerPort warning was inadequate?

Judge Campbell denied Bard's motion for summary judgment in Lattanzio on September 25, 2026, and the characterization of that order is where the reporting diverges.

One outlet headlined the ruling as a finding that the PowerPort warning was inadequate, describing it as holding that Bard's instructions for use failed to warn doctors of the risk of catheter-related bloodstream infection, and some secondary coverage went further, describing the warning question as effectively decided against Bard and leaving the jury to assess what the failure cost the plaintiff. Other accounts of the same order, and the case-law database excerpts of it, describe a narrower and more conventional summary-judgment ruling: the court could not find the warnings adequate as a matter of law, noted that the instructions did not specifically address the bloodstream infection Lattanzio alleged, and held that disputed facts on warning adequacy, design defect, misrepresentation and concealment, and punitive damages had to be tried.

The difference matters. Denying summary judgment means only that a reasonable jury could find the warnings inadequate; it is not a directed finding that they were. On the narrower reading, which is what a summary-judgment denial ordinarily does and which is consistent with the court sending the warning claim to the jury at all, there is no contradiction in the verdict: the jury heard the warning evidence and found for Bard, or found that any warning gap did not cause the injury. On the broader reading, the defense verdict would have to rest entirely on causation. Either way, the practical lesson is the same, and it is the one the Cook jury already taught: in an infection case, getting past summary judgment on warnings is not the same as proving that a different warning would have prevented the infection.

The September 25 order also reportedly cleared the punitive damages claim for trial, finding sufficient evidence to send it to a jury under Florida law, and rejected Bard's argument that the claims were time-barred. Florida's limitations period for product liability actions is four years, and the database excerpt of the order shows that defendants argued the claims were barred under it. Because the jury found for Bard on liability, neither of those rulings will be tested on appeal by Bard in this case, and the plaintiff's appellate options would run against the trial rulings and instructions rather than against the pretrial order she won.

What would the punitive phase have decided under Florida law?

Because Lattanzio was a Florida plaintiff, the punitive question was framed by Florida's statutory scheme, and it is worth setting out what the bifurcated second phase would have required, since it explains why both sides agreed to separate it.

Florida conditions punitive damages on proof by clear and convincing evidence that the defendant was personally guilty of intentional misconduct or gross negligence, under section 768.72 of the Florida Statutes, and caps most awards under section 768.73 at the greater of three times compensatory damages or $500,000. Higher caps apply where the wrongful conduct was motivated solely by unreasonable financial gain and the danger was known to a managing agent, and the cap falls away where the defendant had a specific intent to harm. A corporation can be liable for an employee's conduct only where its officers, directors or managers actively participated in it, knowingly condoned, ratified or consented to it, or were themselves grossly negligent.

That framework sets a demanding bar for the corporate-knowledge evidence plaintiffs have offered in every PowerPort trial, and two juries have now declined to find even the lesser predicate of fraudulent concealment. Bifurcation in Lattanzio meant the jury heard the liability case without the full weight of that conduct evidence. The plaintiff's bet was that a cleaner liability record would win the first phase; the defense's bet was that keeping the conduct evidence out of the liability phase would keep the case from reaching a second one. On the reported result, the defense bet paid.

How does the Lattanzio verdict compare with the Cook and Divelbliss verdicts?

The three verdicts line up claim by claim as follows, to the extent the findings have been reported.

Claim	Cook (infection)	Divelbliss (fracture)	Lattanzio (infection)
Design defect	Hung	For plaintiff (strict liability and negligence)	Defense verdict; claim-level findings not reported
Failure to warn	For defense	For plaintiff (strict liability and negligence)	Defense verdict; claim-level findings not reported
Failure to instruct	For defense	Not separately reported	Not reported
Manufacturing defect	Not reached	For defense	Not pleaded at trial, per pretrial reports
Fraud, concealment, consumer fraud	For defense	For defense (fraudulent concealment)	Defense verdict; claim-level findings not reported
Punitive damages	Not reached	Declined	Not reached (bifurcated phase never opened)
Compensatory award	None	$40,000,000	None

Three observations follow from the table.

First, no jury in MDL 3081 has found fraud or concealment, and no jury has awarded punitive damages. Two juries have now reached the conduct evidence or the question built on it, and neither found what the plaintiffs needed to unlock punitive exposure. A third, in Lattanzio, never got there. That is now the most consistent finding in the litigation, and it is a defense finding.

Second, the plaintiffs' best evidence is on design, and it has worked once. The Divelbliss jury found the device defectively designed on both strict-liability and negligence theories. The Cook jury could not agree on design. The Lattanzio jury, on the reported outcome, did not deliver a design finding the plaintiff could recover on. The barium sulfate degradation theory is therefore one for three as a basis for recovery, and the one success came on the injury where causation was not in dispute.

Third, the injury track is now the variable that explains the results. Nothing in the public reporting suggests a meaningful difference in trial teams, evidence on the device's composition, or corporate documents across the three trials. The difference is what the plaintiff had to prove happened inside her body.

What is the Bard PowerPort, and what does MDL 3081 allege?

A PowerPort is a totally implanted venous access device: a small reservoir placed under the skin of the chest or arm, connected to a catheter threaded into a central vein. It allows patients on long courses of chemotherapy, antibiotics or nutrition to receive infusions and blood draws without repeated peripheral needle sticks, and the "power" designation means it is rated for the pressure of injected imaging contrast. The device goes into patients who are already seriously ill, and it often stays for years.

The litigation's common question is the catheter material. The products at issue use polyurethane compounded with barium sulfate, a radiopaque filler that makes the tubing visible on imaging. The plaintiffs allege that the filler particles are imperfectly bound, that they leach from the catheter over time, and that what remains is a pitted and fissured surface. From that single mechanism the plaintiffs derive their injury tracks: a weakened wall that fractures and sends a fragment into the heart or lungs, and a roughened surface that harbors bacterial biofilm and promotes infection and clotting.

Two doctrinal features shape the trials. These are devices cleared through the FDA's 510(k) substantial-equivalence pathway, so the express Preemption (Products) bar that forecloses design and warning claims against premarket-approved devices does not apply, which is why design and warning claims are being tried at all. And because every device is implanted by a physician, every warning claim runs through the learned intermediary analysis described above.

How many Bard PowerPort lawsuits are pending?

The JPML's pending-MDL report dated October 1, 2026 listed 4,140 pending actions in MDL 3081 out of 4,420 filed since centralization. That was an increase of roughly 400 cases over the September report, which put the docket at about 3,700, making it one of the faster-growing device MDLs in the federal system this year. Separately, trackers report a parallel New Jersey multicounty litigation for Bard port catheter cases in Bergen County, whose cases do not appear in the federal count.

The Lattanzio verdict lands on an inventory that has been growing quickly since the Divelbliss award in September, and it is reasonable to expect that the composition of that growth matters. Fracture claims with documented migration and retrieval have a plaintiff verdict behind them. Infection claims now have two defense results.

Timeline of the Bard PowerPort litigation

Date	Event
August 2023	JPML centralizes port catheter cases as MDL 3081 before Judge David G. Campbell, District of Arizona
May 2025	Bellwether pool selected, including Lattanzio, No. 24-cv-00680
April 21, 2026	First bellwether, Cook, opens
May 2026	Cook defense verdict on warnings and consumer fraud; jury hung on design defect
August 18, 2026	Second bellwether, Divelbliss, opens
September 4, 2026	Divelbliss verdict: $40 million compensatory; no punitive damages
September 10, 2026	Judgment entered in Divelbliss
September 25, 2026	Summary judgment denied in Lattanzio; punitive claim and limitations defense left for trial
October 1, 2026	JPML report: 4,140 pending actions, 4,420 filed
October 8, 2026	Bard moves for a new trial in Divelbliss
October 13, 2026	Third bellwether, Lattanzio, opens
October 30, 2026	Lattanzio defense verdict
December 1, 2026	Fourth bellwether, Hicks, set to begin
February 2, 2027	Fifth bellwether, Sorensen, set to begin

The calendar is unusually compressed for a device MDL. Five trial settings inside ten months means each verdict is absorbed into the next trial's preparation almost immediately, and the parties will be choosing evidence and themes for Hicks in November with the Lattanzio result fresh.

Is there a Bard PowerPort settlement after the third bellwether?

No. There is no Global Settlement, no announced Settlement Matrix, no claims program and no registration deadline in MDL 3081. Dollar ranges published on intake and "settlement amount" pages are projections borrowed from other litigations, not terms anyone has agreed.

The October verdict makes an early global deal less likely, not more. A defendant that has won two of three trials, has never been found to have concealed anything, and has never been hit with punitive damages has no record-based reason to capitalize a program covering the whole docket. The more plausible path, if the fracture track keeps producing plaintiff results, is the one familiar from other device dockets: an inventory-segmented approach in which fracture and migration claims are valued against the Divelbliss record and infection claims are discounted heavily or excluded until a plaintiff wins one.

The pending post-trial motions are part of that calculus. Bard moved for a new trial in Divelbliss on October 8, 2026, arguing, in HarrisMartin's account of the filing, that plaintiff's counsel "weaponized" its experts' compensation to obtain a "manifestly excessive" verdict, and pointing to counsel's closing request that the jury award "2 million bucks a year at 20 to 30 years," which counsel framed as 40 to 60 million dollars. The plaintiff in Cook has her own motion for a new trial pending, attacking the jury instructions on design defect, warnings and superseding cause and arguing the jury was pressured by the trial's scheduled end date. No ruling on either motion has been reported. A remittitur or new trial in Divelbliss would leave the plaintiffs without any intact verdict; a new trial in Cook would put a third infection case on the calendar.

Does the Lattanzio verdict affect other Bard PowerPort cases?

Not as a matter of law. A bellwether verdict binds only the parties to that trial; it does not dismiss, reduce or decide any other plaintiff's claim, and nothing in the October 30 result changes a single pending case's legal status. Every other case in the docket keeps its own claims, its own facts and its own day in court.

As a matter of valuation, it affects them a great deal. Bellwether trials exist to produce information about how juries value representative cases, and the information produced so far is consistent: a fracture case with a fragment in the heart won $40 million; two infection cases with documented infections, device removal and treatment disruption won nothing. Defense counsel will use that pattern in every negotiation over infection inventory, and plaintiffs' leadership will have to answer it with something other than the Divelbliss number.

The point applies equally in reverse. The Lattanzio verdict says nothing about fracture claims, and it would be an overreading to treat a defense result on an infection theory as a referendum on the device's design generally. The Divelbliss findings on design defect and failure to warn remain on the record unless and until Judge Campbell disturbs them.

Will Bard PowerPort infection claims still go to trial?

That depends on what the parties and the court do with the next bellwether settings. The fourth trial, Hicks, is set for December 1 to December 18, 2026 and has been reported as a thrombosis case rather than an infection case; the fifth, Sorensen, is set for February 2 to February 19, 2027. Neither is currently reported as an infection trial.

Thrombosis sits between the two existing tracks. Like infection, a clot in a patient with an indwelling catheter has competing explanations, including the patient's underlying cancer and its treatment, which independently raise clotting risk. Like fracture, the plaintiffs will tie it to a physical change in the catheter surface. Hicks therefore tests whether the degraded-surface theory can win when causation is contested but the injury is not infection, and its result will tell both sides whether the infection losses reflect something about infection specifically or about contested causation generally.

For the infection cohort, the next opportunity to try a case may be a remand trial rather than a bellwether, or a retrial in Cook if the new-trial motion is granted. Either way, the infection inventory now has no near-term trial date that could reset its value upward.

Can you still file a Bard PowerPort lawsuit after the verdict?

Yes. Nothing in the Lattanzio verdict closes the MDL to new filings, and new federal cases continue to be filed directly into MDL 3081 or transferred to it. Whether any particular claim is timely is governed by the limitations law of the state whose law applies to it, and Lattanzio itself shows that limitations is a live defense: Bard argued the claims were barred under Florida's four-year product liability period, and the court left the issue unresolved at summary judgment. Claims with long gaps between the implant, the injury and the date the injured person connected the two face the most scrutiny.

What the verdict changes is the profile of a strong claim. Reported intake criteria in this docket center on catheter fracture with migration, infection requiring removal, and thrombosis. After October 30, the first of those categories has trial support and the second has none.

The general causation gate the coverage misses

None of the verdict coverage addresses the procedural question that matters more than any single trial result. Daubert and summary-judgment briefing in MDL 3081 has been conducted on General Causation as well as on the individual bellwether cases, with Judge Campbell ruling on a rolling basis. A Daubert Challenge to the plaintiffs' general-causation experts is not case-specific. If an expert opinion that the device's composition causes a category of injury is excluded, that injury theory fails in every case on the docket, regardless of any jury's verdict.

The Lattanzio result does not change that legal gate, but it changes the leverage around it. Two juries have now heard the infection-causation case and rejected it. That does not make the plaintiffs' experts inadmissible, because admissibility under Rule 702 turns on method and reliability rather than on whether jurors were persuaded. But it gives the defense a factual narrative, two contested-causation losses, to pair with any remaining challenges to the scope of the infection-causation opinions as cases move toward remand.

What it means for claimants' counsel, defense counsel and funders

For claimants' counsel, the immediate task is segmentation. A Bard PowerPort docket that was already being priced in two tiers, fracture and infection, has now been priced by juries in two tiers. Fracture and migration files with documented retrieval sit behind a $40 million plaintiff verdict with design-defect and warning findings. Infection files sit behind two defense results, one with a design deadlock and one without a reported design finding the plaintiff could recover on. The work that most improves an infection file now is case-specific causation evidence that rules out the ordinary alternative routes: access and care records, culture results tied to the catheter rather than the bloodstream generally, explant pathology showing surface degradation at the colonized site, and treating-physician testimony on what a different warning would have changed. Firms should also audit infection files with long implant-to-injury intervals for limitations and Discovery Rule exposure, since the August 2013 implant in Lattanzio is typical rather than exceptional.

For defense counsel, the record now supports three themes across the docket: no jury has found concealment, no jury has awarded punitive damages, and contested-causation injuries have lost twice. The Divelbliss new-trial motion is the near-term priority, because vacating or remitting the only plaintiff verdict would leave the plaintiffs with no intact win going into Hicks. Bifurcation, which kept the punitive conduct evidence away from the Lattanzio liability phase, is a structure worth seeking in every later trial.

For funders and portfolio buyers, the October verdict is a pricing event for roughly half of any mixed inventory. Third-Party Litigation Funding underwritten on the September headline number, without separating fracture from infection, now carries an obvious exposure. The variables that move the portfolio from here are the rulings on the Divelbliss and Cook post-trial motions, the Hicks thrombosis result in December, and any rolling Daubert orders narrowing the causation opinions.

For all sides, the cost of trial preparation is borne first by leadership and later recovered through assessments on resolved cases paid into the Common Benefit Fund, including by firms that never tried a case. Three trials in six months, with two more set, are building that assessment now, and it will sit alongside any Medical Lien and the Contingency Fee in the arithmetic between a gross settlement and what a claimant actually receives.

Frequently asked questions

What was the Bard PowerPort verdict on October 30, 2026?

A federal jury in Phoenix returned a defense verdict for C.R. Bard and Becton Dickinson in Lattanzio v. Becton Dickinson, the third bellwether trial in MDL 3081. The plaintiff, a Florida woman alleging a bloodstream infection from a port implanted in August 2013, was awarded nothing, and the bifurcated punitive phase was never reached.

How many Bard PowerPort bellwether trials has Bard won?

Bard has won two of three: Cook in May 2026, a defense verdict on failure to warn, failure to instruct and consumer fraud with a hung jury on design defect, and Lattanzio in October 2026. The plaintiff won Divelbliss, a catheter-fracture case, with a $40 million compensatory verdict on September 4, 2026.

Is the $40 million Bard PowerPort verdict still standing?

Yes, as of publication. Judgment for $40 million plus post-judgment interest and costs was entered on September 10, 2026, and Bard's October 8 motion for a new trial, which argues the award was manifestly excessive, has not been reported as decided.

When is the next Bard PowerPort bellwether trial?

The fourth bellwether, Hicks, is set for December 1 to December 18, 2026 and has been reported as a thrombosis case. The fifth, Sorensen, is set for February 2 to February 19, 2027.

Is there a Bard PowerPort settlement?

No. There is no global settlement, settlement matrix, claims program or deadline in MDL 3081, and figures on intake pages are projections rather than agreed terms. Two defense wins in three trials make an early docket-wide deal less likely.

Does the Lattanzio verdict end other Bard PowerPort infection lawsuits?

No. A bellwether verdict binds only the parties to that case, and every pending infection claim survives. The verdict does, however, lower the negotiating value of infection claims, which are now 0-2 at trial.