Bard PowerPort Summary Judgment Denied in Hicks: A Clot Case Becomes the Fourth Bellwether on Dec. 1

Judge David G. Campbell denied C.R. Bard's motion for summary judgment in Hicks, the fourth Bard PowerPort bellwether, in an order dated October 26, 2026, holding that the plaintiff had identified a feasible alternative design and that her evidence created a jury question on whether Bard adequately warned of the device's risks. The Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling sends a Missouri woman's X-Port case to trial in Phoenix on December 1, the first trial in MDL 3081 built on a blood-clot injury, four weeks after Bard won the third bellwether and took a 2-1 lead.

The order was reported by HarrisMartin on October 27, the day after the parties' final pretrial conference in Phoenix. It is the kind of ruling that rarely makes headlines on its own, because summary judgment denials in bellwether cases are common and decide nothing about liability. This one deserves closer reading for three reasons. It confirms which theories the Hicks jury will hear. It answers, at least for one case, the question that two infection losses raised about whether the barium sulfate design theory still has legs outside the fracture context. And it moves to trial a case whose injury history does not fit neatly into any of the litigation's three tracks.

What did the judge decide in the Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling in Hicks?

Judge Campbell, who has presided over In re Bard Implanted Port Catheter Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3081, since the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) centralized it in the District of Arizona in August 2023, denied Bard's motion in Hicks. According to HarrisMartin's account of the October 26 order, the court made two findings that matter for trial.

First, on Design Defect, the court found that the plaintiff had identified a feasible alternative design in support of her claim. Second, on Failure to Warn, the court found that the plaintiff's evidence created a question of fact as to whether the defendants adequately warned of the device's risks. Both claims will therefore go to the jury.

What summary judgment means here is narrow, and it is worth stating precisely. Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 56, a court grants summary judgment only where there is no genuine dispute of material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Denial means a reasonable jury could find for the plaintiff on the record presented. It is not a finding that the device was defective, that the warning was inadequate, or that either caused Hicks's injury. The same distinction applied in September, when Judge Campbell denied Bard's motion in Lattanzio: some coverage described that order as a ruling that the warnings were inadequate, and the Lattanzio jury then returned a defense verdict on October 30.

The public reporting on the Hicks order has not described which specific alternative design the plaintiff offered, how the court resolved choice of law, or whether any claims were narrowed or abandoned in the briefing. Those details will matter at trial and will become visible in the jury instructions. This article does not guess at them.

Is the Hicks case about a blood clot or an infection?

Both descriptions have circulated, and the difference matters for how the case is read.

The court's own bellwether selection order classified the case, Hicks, No. 23-cv-01703, as a polyurethane thrombus case. The same order named Miller, No. 24-cv-00612, as a second polyurethane thrombus case and Cook, No. 23-cv-01975, as a polyurethane infection case, and it described the selection criteria behind the bellwether pool: three infection cases, two thrombus cases and one fracture case; four polyurethane catheters, one Groshong catheter and one silicone catheter.

The plaintiff's own account of her injury, as summarized by AboutLawsuits from the complaint filed in June 2023, is more complicated. Hicks received the port in February 2021 for breast cancer treatment. Less than a month after implant, she developed neutropenia and a staphylococcal infection that was traced to the surgical site. She later developed a blood clot, and the port catheter was removed after two surgeries. One search summary of the complaint describes doctors removing the device in May 2022 after having to declot an embolism.

The best reading is that Hicks is a thrombus case with an infection in its history. That matters in two ways. For the plaintiffs, it means the jury will hear about a device that, on their theory, failed in more than one way in the same patient, which can make the degraded-surface narrative more concrete. For Bard, it means the infection and the clot each come with their own alternative explanations, and an early surgical-site infection in a neutropenic chemotherapy patient is the textbook example of an infection with a source other than the catheter material.

Some trackers, and the earlier coverage on this site, described Hicks simply as a thrombosis case; AboutLawsuits described it as an infection case. Neither label is wrong. The court's classification, which governs how the bellwether is meant to inform the rest of the docket, is thrombus.

What is the Bard X-Port, and is it part of the PowerPort litigation?

HarrisMartin reported that Hicks received a Bard X-Port with a ChronoFlex polyurethane catheter on February 21, 2021, for chemotherapy related to breast cancer. AboutLawsuits described the same device as a Bard PowerPort. The discrepancy reflects how the litigation is labeled more than any dispute about what was implanted.

"Bard PowerPort lawsuit" is the shorthand the market uses, but MDL 3081 is not limited to the PowerPort brand. The JPML's August 8, 2023 transfer order framed the common questions by the catheter material rather than by model name: whether a high concentration of barium sulfate in the catheter component reduces its integrity and causes injury, whether the defendants adequately tested the devices, and whether they adequately monitored and reported adverse events. Bard's implanted port family includes several models, and the MDL's master pleadings reach the devices that share the challenged catheter formulation. The bellwether order's own categories, polyurethane, Groshong and silicone, are categories of catheter, not of port.

That framing is why Hicks can serve as a bellwether even though the device is not branded PowerPort. The plaintiffs' theory runs through the catheter, not the reservoir. A ChronoFlex polyurethane catheter compounded with barium sulfate is, on that theory, the same problem whatever port it is attached to.

For defense counsel, model-level differences remain a live argument at trial: what the instructions for use for that model said, when they said it, and what the implanting physician knew. For plaintiffs with non-PowerPort Bard ports, the Hicks trial is the first bellwether whose device has been publicly reported under a different model name, which makes it more representative of the docket's long tail than the earlier trials.

Why does a feasible alternative design matter in the Bard PowerPort cases?

The finding that Hicks identified a feasible alternative design is the most significant part of the Bard PowerPort summary judgment order, because the design claim is the plaintiffs' strongest and most contested theory.

In design defect litigation, many jurisdictions require, or allow juries to weigh, evidence that a safer design was available and practicable. Even where state law does not make a reasonable alternative design a strict element, the existence of one is usually the core of the plaintiff's proof that the product's risks outweighed its benefits. In MDL 3081 the alternatives have been framed around the catheter formulation: a lower barium sulfate loading, a different radiopaque agent or bonding method, or a coating that reduces surface degradation, among others. Which one Hicks offered has not been reported.

The finding matters for three reasons.

It confirms that the design theory survives outside fracture. Two infection juries have now declined to find for the plaintiff on design: Cook hung on design defect, and Lattanzio returned a defense verdict without any reported design finding for the plaintiff. Only Divelbliss, a fracture case, produced a design-defect verdict. A ruling that a thrombus plaintiff has enough alternative-design evidence to reach a jury means the design theory gets a fourth test on a third injury type.

It reflects the court's earlier expert rulings. In April 2026, Judge Campbell ruled, as Mealey's reported, that a plaintiffs' scientist could largely offer her opinions on design defects but not on whether a specific defect caused infection risk. The pattern in that ruling, design opinions in and causation-specific opinions narrowed, is consistent with what the Hicks order does: it lets the alternative-design evidence go to the jury while leaving causation to be contested at trial.

It shifts the trial's center of gravity to causation. If the jury is permitted to find that a safer catheter existed, Bard's best defense is that a safer catheter would not have prevented this patient's clot. That is a case-specific argument about cancer, chemotherapy and catheter-associated thrombosis, and it is where Hicks will likely be decided.

The warnings question, and why it keeps reaching juries

The second finding, that Hicks's evidence creates a fact question on whether Bard adequately warned, repeats what Judge Campbell has done in each bellwether. Warnings claims involving implanted medical devices run through the Learned Intermediary Doctrine: the manufacturer's duty is to warn the prescribing or implanting physician, and the plaintiff must show both that the warning to the physician was inadequate and that an adequate warning would have changed the physician's decision or management.

Warnings claims survive summary judgment often because the first half of that test is fact-intensive: what the instructions for use said about a particular complication, how prominently, and in what terms. The second half, warning causation, is where they tend to fail at trial. The Cook jury found for Bard on failure to warn and failure to instruct. The Lattanzio jury found for Bard outright. The Divelbliss jury found for the plaintiff on failure to warn, but in a fracture case where the injury itself was unusual and dramatic.

Thrombosis presents the warning-causation question in a sharp form. Catheter-associated thrombosis is a known risk of any central venous access device, and oncologists and interventional radiologists counsel patients about it. Bard will argue that Hicks's physicians knew the risk, would have implanted a port anyway, and managed the clot the way they would have managed any catheter clot. The plaintiff will argue that the risk Bard failed to disclose was not thrombosis in general but an elevated rate of thrombosis attributable to this catheter's degrading surface, and that a physician told about that elevated risk would have chosen a different device.

Why is a thrombus trial different from the fracture and infection trials?

Each injury track in MDL 3081 poses a different causation problem, and the thrombus track sits between the two that juries have already decided.

A fracture case is close to self-proving on causation. When a catheter fragment breaks off and lodges in the heart, as the plaintiff alleged in Divelbliss, nobody disputes where it came from. The trial is about whether the catheter should have broken, not whether it caused the harm, and that is the only track on which the plaintiffs have won.

An infection case is the opposite. A bloodstream infection in a patient with an indwelling port can come from skin flora introduced at access, from handling during infusions, from the patient's immune status, or from the catheter surface. The plaintiff must persuade the jury that the surface, rather than any of those routes, was responsible. Two juries, in Cook and Lattanzio, were not persuaded.

A thrombus case shares the infection problem but in a different form. Cancer itself raises clotting risk, many chemotherapy regimens raise it further, and any foreign body in a vein can provoke a clot regardless of what it is made of. Bard's defense will be that Hicks's clot is the ordinary, disclosed consequence of a central line in a cancer patient. The plaintiff's answer, on the theory pleaded across the docket, is that a degraded, pitted catheter surface promotes clot formation beyond the baseline, and that the rate of thrombotic complications with these catheters exceeds what physicians were told to expect.

Two features of Hicks will test that answer. The first is timing: an infection within a month of implant and a clot later in the device's life give each side a story about which event caused which. The second is the explant evidence. If the removed catheter shows surface degradation at the site of the clot, the plaintiff has a physical link that infection plaintiffs have struggled to show; if it does not, Bard's baseline-risk defense becomes much stronger.

The result will be read across the docket. Atraxia Media, in a preview of the bellwether program, described Hicks as the first meaningful federal jury read on how thrombus claims differ from the infection cases. That is right, and it is why the summary judgment ruling, which guarantees that the design and warning theories reach that jury intact, matters more than its procedural posture suggests.

What law will govern the Hicks trial, and can the jury award punitive damages?

Neither the order's choice-of-law ruling nor the status of any punitive damages claim in Hicks has been reported. But in an MDL, a transferee court applies the choice-of-law rules of the state where each case was filed, or for direct-filed cases, the rules the parties have agreed or the court has determined. Hicks is a Missouri resident who was implanted in Missouri, and Missouri substantive law is the likely result. If it applies, several features differ from the Florida law that governed Lattanzio.

Product liability elements. Missouri's product liability statute, section 537.760 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri, defines a strict-liability claim around whether the product was in a defective condition unreasonably dangerous when put to a reasonably anticipated use, or was unreasonably dangerous without an adequate warning, and whether the plaintiff was damaged as a direct result. Missouri courts have traditionally left the question of whether a design is unreasonably dangerous to the jury, which is one reason a feasible-alternative-design finding at summary judgment is significant: it frames the evidence the jury will use to answer that question.

Punitive damages standard. Since 2020, section 510.261 has required clear and convincing proof that the defendant intentionally harmed the plaintiff without just cause or acted with a deliberate and flagrant disregard for the safety of others. The same statute bars a plaintiff from pleading Punitive Damages in an initial pleading and requires leave of court, on a showing of a reasonable basis for an award, before a later pleading may add the claim. Whether that pleading rule binds a federal court sitting in diversity is disputed, because federal courts treat pleading as procedural and governed by the Federal Rules, but the clear-and-convincing substantive standard would apply either way.

Punitive damages cap. Section 510.265 limits punitive damages in most cases to the greater of $500,000 or five times the net amount of the judgment. Florida's comparable cap, which framed Lattanzio, is generally the greater of three times compensatory damages or $500,000.

Limitations. Missouri's general limitations period for personal injury is five years under section 516.120. Hicks was implanted in February 2021 and sued in June 2023, so the limitations defense that Bard pressed in Lattanzio, an August 2013 implant tried under Florida's four-year product liability period, is unlikely to be a serious issue here.

The punitive question has a practical history in this docket. No MDL 3081 jury has awarded punitive damages. The Divelbliss jury declined to find fraudulent concealment and declined punitive damages, and the Lattanzio trial was bifurcated so that punitive damages would be tried only after a liability verdict for the plaintiff, a phase that never opened. Whether Hicks will be bifurcated in the same way has not been reported.

What is the Bard PowerPort bellwether record so far?

The record entering Hicks is two defense results and one plaintiff verdict, divided along the injury line.

Trial	Case	Injury track	Dates	Outcome
1st bellwether	Cook v. Becton Dickinson	Infection (polyurethane)	Opened April 21, 2026; verdict May 2026	For Bard on failure to warn, failure to instruct and consumer fraud; jury hung on design defect
2nd bellwether	Divelbliss v. Becton Dickinson	Fracture, fragment migration	Opened August 18, 2026; verdict September 4, 2026	$40 million compensatory for plaintiff; no fraudulent concealment; no punitive damages
3rd bellwether	Lattanzio v. Becton Dickinson	Infection, 2013 implant	October 13 to October 30, 2026	Defense verdict; bifurcated punitive phase not reached
4th bellwether	Hicks v. Bard	Thrombus (polyurethane), with early surgical-site infection	Set to open December 1, 2026	Summary judgment denied October 26, 2026
5th bellwether	Sorensen v. Bard	Not publicly characterized in detail	Set to open February 2, 2027	Pending

Two post-trial motions remain open. Bard moved on October 8, 2026 for a new trial in Divelbliss, arguing, in HarrisMartin's account, that plaintiff's counsel "weaponized" expert compensation to win a "manifestly excessive" award. The Cook plaintiff has moved for a new trial on the instructions. Neither ruling has been reported. If Judge Campbell orders a new trial or remittitur in Divelbliss before December, the plaintiffs would go into Hicks without an intact verdict.

The Hicks order fits the pattern of every earlier Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling in the bellwether program: each case that reached the pretrial stage has gone to a jury on design and warnings. The court has not used summary judgment to narrow the bellwether program; it has used it to confirm which claims are triable and left the answers to juries. That is consistent with the purpose of a Bellwether Trial, which is to produce information about how juries value representative cases.

When is the next Bard PowerPort bellwether trial?

The next trial is Hicks, set to begin December 1, 2026 before Judge Campbell in Phoenix. AboutLawsuits reported the December 1 date, and the MDL Update tracker reports a December 1 to December 21 window under First Amended Case Management Order 50, entered September 24, 2026, with the final pretrial conference held October 26, the date of the summary judgment order. Earlier pages listing Hicks for October 13 are stale; that slot went to Lattanzio.

The court has continued to manage the trials tightly. Litigation Sentinel reported that Judge Campbell directed that proposed trial exhibit lists not exceed 750 exhibits per side, drawing on the experience of the Cook trial, and that evidence not disclosed under the court's orders and the federal rules would be excluded absent manifest injustice. The report is not entirely clear about which trial the cap was first set for, but the same structure is expected to govern Hicks.

Date	Event
February 21, 2021	Hicks receives a Bard X-Port with a ChronoFlex polyurethane catheter
June 2023	Hicks's complaint is filed, per AboutLawsuits
August 8, 2023	JPML centralizes port catheter cases as MDL 3081 in the District of Arizona
April 2026	Expert ruling: design opinions largely admitted, infection-specific causation opinions limited
May 2026	Cook verdict for Bard on warnings and consumer fraud; design hung
September 4, 2026	Divelbliss verdict: $40 million compensatory
September 24, 2026	First Amended CMO 50 sets Hicks for December 1
September 25, 2026	Summary judgment denied in Lattanzio
October 8, 2026	Bard moves for new trial in Divelbliss
October 26, 2026	Summary judgment denied in Hicks; final pretrial conference
October 30, 2026	Lattanzio defense verdict
December 1, 2026	Hicks trial set to begin
February 2, 2027	Sorensen trial set to begin

Is there a Bard PowerPort settlement?

No. There is no Global Settlement, no Settlement Matrix, no claims administrator and no registration deadline in MDL 3081. Figures on intake and "settlement amount" pages are projections, not agreed terms.

The Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling in Hicks does not change that picture by itself, but it shapes the next data point both sides will use. A plaintiff verdict in a thrombus case would show that the design theory can win where causation is genuinely contested and the injury is not a fracture, which would put pressure on Bard to price the non-fracture inventory higher. A defense verdict would leave the plaintiffs with a 1-3 record and a single fracture win, and would make an inventory-segmented approach, valuing fracture claims against Divelbliss and discounting the rest, the likely structure of any eventual deal.

The JPML's October 1, 2026 pending-MDL report listed 4,140 pending actions in MDL 3081 out of 4,420 filed. The docket has grown quickly through 2026, and the composition of that inventory, how many fracture, infection and thrombus claims it contains, is the variable that will determine what any settlement is worth.

Does the Hicks Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling affect other lawsuits?

Not directly. A summary judgment ruling in a bellwether case decides only that case. It does not establish that any other plaintiff has a feasible alternative design or a triable warnings claim, and it does not bind the court in later rulings, although the court's reasoning will inform them.

The indirect effects are real. Thrombus cases have, until now, had no pretrial ruling or trial result of their own; the docket's information came from infection and fracture. The Hicks order is the first signal that a thrombus plaintiff's design and warning evidence clears Rule 56. The December verdict will be the first jury valuation of a thrombus claim. Lawyers on both sides will use both to sort inventories, and the AboutLawsuits observation that no bellwether outcome legally decides other cases remains true while those valuations shift.

For cases eventually remanded to their home districts, the Hicks ruling also previews how Judge Campbell is likely to treat similar summary judgment motions before remand. A transferee judge who has consistently denied summary judgment on design and warnings in bellwethers is unlikely to grant it across the board in pretrial rulings for the rest of the docket.

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

For claimants' counsel, the October 26 Bard PowerPort summary judgment order is a reason to reorganize thrombus files now rather than after the verdict. The proof that wins a thrombus case is case-specific: imaging that places the clot at the catheter tip or along its course; explant pathology showing surface degradation; records of catheter function, flushing and declotting; and treating-physician testimony on whether a disclosed elevated-clot risk would have changed device selection or anticoagulation. Files where the clot history is entangled with a known hypercoagulable state from cancer or chemotherapy face the hardest Specific Causation fight, and the Hicks trial will show how a jury weighs that problem. Firms with non-PowerPort Bard ports, such as X-Port devices, should also note that the bellwether program now includes one, and that the jury's treatment of model-specific labeling will matter for those claims. Counsel should keep an eye on the Medical Lien and Common Benefit Fund arithmetic too, which grows with every trial leadership tries.

For defense counsel, the order narrows the trial to causation. With design and warnings both triable, Bard's strongest themes are alternative causation for the clot, the early surgical-site infection as an independent event in a neutropenic patient, and the learned intermediary's existing knowledge of catheter-associated thrombosis. The Divelbliss new-trial motion remains the near-term priority: a ruling vacating or reducing the only plaintiff verdict before December would reframe Hicks as a trial the plaintiffs must win to establish any intact result. Bifurcation of punitive damages, which kept conduct evidence out of the Lattanzio liability phase, is worth seeking again, along with arguments under Missouri's clear-and-convincing punitive standard if Missouri law governs.

For funders and portfolio buyers, Hicks is the next pricing event. Third-Party Litigation Funding underwritten on the September Divelbliss number was exposed by the infection loss in Lattanzio. Thrombus claims have been priced, until now, by analogy. After December they will have their own data point, and diligence on any mixed Bard port portfolio should break out thrombus files and test them against the evidence categories listed above. The Divelbliss post-trial ruling and the February Sorensen trial are the other variables to watch, along with the remand-stage treatment of design and warning claims.

For all sides, the compressed calendar, five bellwether trial settings inside ten months, means each result feeds the next trial's preparation almost immediately. The parties built their Hicks exhibit lists before the Lattanzio verdict came in. They will refine their themes in November with it fresh.

Frequently asked questions

What did the judge decide in the Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling in Hicks?

Judge David G. Campbell denied it on October 26, 2026. According to HarrisMartin, the court found that Judy Hicks identified a feasible alternative design for her design defect claim and that her evidence created a fact question on whether Bard adequately warned, so both claims go to the jury.

When is the next Bard PowerPort bellwether trial?

Hicks v. Bard, the fourth bellwether in MDL 3081, is set to begin December 1, 2026 in the District of Arizona, with a reported window through December 21. The fifth bellwether, Sorensen, is set for February 2, 2027.

Is the Hicks case about a blood clot or an infection?

The court classified Hicks as a polyurethane thrombus case. The plaintiff's history, as reported from her complaint, also includes neutropenia and a staph infection at the surgical site within a month of her February 2021 implant, followed by a clot and two surgeries to remove the catheter.

Is the Bard X-Port part of the PowerPort lawsuit?

Yes, in substance. MDL 3081 is organized around the catheter material, barium sulfate compounded into polyurethane or silicone, rather than the PowerPort brand name, and Hicks involves an X-Port with a ChronoFlex polyurethane catheter. It is the first bellwether whose device has been publicly reported as a model other than the PowerPort.

What is the Bard PowerPort bellwether record so far?

Bard leads 2-1. It won Cook, an infection case, in May 2026 on warnings and consumer fraud with a hung jury on design, and Lattanzio, another infection case, on October 30, 2026. The plaintiff won Divelbliss, a fracture case, with a $40 million compensatory verdict on September 4, 2026.

Is there a Bard PowerPort settlement?

No. There is no global settlement, settlement matrix or claims program in MDL 3081, which had 4,140 pending actions in the JPML's October 1, 2026 report. Published settlement amounts are projections.

Does the Hicks Bard PowerPort summary judgment ruling affect other lawsuits?

Not legally. A summary judgment denial in one bellwether binds no other case. It does signal that thrombus claims can reach a jury on design and warnings, and the December verdict will give thrombus claims their first trial valuation.