The Bard PowerPort Bellwether Trial Scorecard Is 1-1 and the October Infection Case Breaks the Tie

The third Bard PowerPort bellwether trial begins on 13 October 2026 in the District of Arizona, and it is an infection case brought by a Florida plaintiff, May Lattanzio, who received her implanted port in August 2013. It matters because the first two trials in MDL 3081 split: an April 2026 infection case ended in a defense verdict on every claim the jury decided and a deadlock on design defect, and a fracture case tried in August produced a $40m compensatory award on 4 September 2026. One injury track has a verdict, the other does not, and the October trial is the first chance to find out whether the infection theory was beaten on its merits or beaten once.

That is the whole significance of the date, and it is the thing the first page of search results does not say. The intake pages report a trial calendar and a headline number. What the calendar means — which theory is being retested, what the two juries actually agreed on, and what has to happen before trials four, five and six occur at all — is a different question, and it is the one that governs how anyone holding Bard PowerPort inventory should be thinking in the next four weeks.

What happened in the Bard PowerPort bellwether trials so far?

Two Bellwether Trials have been tried to verdict in In re Bard Implanted Port Catheter Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3081, the Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) centralized in the District of Arizona before Judge David G. Campbell in August 2023. The docket covers implanted port catheters sold by C.R. Bard, now a Becton Dickinson subsidiary, and the claims divide into two broad injury theories: catheter fracture, where a section of the tubing separates and a fragment migrates through the venous system, and catheter-related infection, where the device is alleged to harbor and seed bacteria.

The scorecard reads one apiece, and the split runs along the injury line rather than along any obvious difference in lawyering.

Trial	Case	Injury theory	Trial opened	Outcome	Date
First bellwether	Cook v. Becton, Dickinson	Infection after port placement, delayed chemotherapy	21 April 2026	Defense verdict on failure to warn, failure to instruct and consumer fraud; jury hung on design defect	May 2026
Second bellwether	Divelbliss v. Becton, Dickinson	Catheter fracture, fragment migrated to the heart	18 August 2026	Plaintiff verdict, $40m compensatory; no manufacturing defect, no fraudulent concealment, no punitive damages	4 September 2026
Third bellwether	Lattanzio v. Becton, Dickinson	Infection following an August 2013 implant	13 October 2026	Pending; bifurcated, liability first, punitive damages in a later phase	—

Two further trial settings have been reported, on 1 December 2026 and 2 February 2027. The most careful public tracker of this litigation cautions that those two dates have not been tied to named plaintiffs in a case management order anyone can point to, and that caution is worth adopting rather than guessing: the dates are reported, the cases behind them are not confirmed.

What the table does not show, and what matters more than the running score, is that the two juries disagreed about less than the headline results suggest. Both were asked whether the device was defectively designed. One could not answer. The other said yes twice, in strict liability and in negligence. Neither jury was willing to find that Bard concealed anything.

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 upper arm, joined to a flexible catheter that is threaded into a central vein. It spares patients on long courses of chemotherapy, antibiotics or parenteral nutrition the repeated peripheral sticks that destroy veins, and the "power" designation means it is rated to tolerate the pressure of injected contrast for imaging. It is, in other words, a device that goes into people who are already seriously ill and stays there for years.

The litigation is about what the catheter is made of. The products at issue use polyurethane formulations compounded with barium sulfate, a radiopaque filler that makes the tubing visible on imaging, and the plaintiffs' theory is that the filler is the defect. The allegation is that barium sulfate particles are imperfectly bound in the polymer, that they migrate and leach out in the bloodstream over time, and that what they leave behind is a pitted, fissured catheter surface. From that single mechanism the plaintiffs derive both injury tracks. A weakened wall is said to explain fracture: the tubing separates and a fragment embolizes downstream, into the right atrium, the ventricle or the pulmonary arteries, where it has to be retrieved. A roughened surface is said to explain infection and thrombosis: it offers bacteria a scaffold on which to form biofilm that the immune system and systemic antibiotics cannot reach.

That is the common question that made the cases centralizable. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) created MDL No. 3081 in August 2023 and sent it to Judge David G. Campbell in the District of Arizona, who had previously managed the Bard inferior vena cava filter MDL in the same district — a matter of assignment, not of doctrine, but a reason the docket has moved on a disciplined schedule. Filings grew from a few dozen actions at centralization to roughly 3,700 by the September 2026 report.

Two doctrinal features of the device shape everything that follows. First, these are Class II devices cleared through the FDA's 510(k) substantial-equivalence pathway rather than approved through premarket approval. The express Preemption (Products) bar that forecloses design and warning claims against premarket-approved devices does not reach 510(k) products, which is why design defect and Failure to Warn are being tried at all here rather than dismissed at the pleadings, as they routinely are in PMA device cases. Second, because the product is prescribed and implanted by a physician, every warning claim runs through the Learned Intermediary Doctrine: the duty is owed to the implanting clinician, and the plaintiff must show that a different warning would have changed that clinician's conduct. Cook is the first demonstration of how hard that is when the risk in question — infection at a vascular access site — is one every oncologist already counsels patients about.

Why did the first Bard PowerPort bellwether trial end in a defense verdict?

Cook was an infection case with sympathetic facts. The plaintiff, a colorectal cancer patient, alleged that his port became infected in 2022, that he was hospitalized for six days, that the device had to be surgically removed, and that his chemotherapy was interrupted for roughly two weeks. Courthouse News covered the opening as the first of a planned programme of trials that would shape more than 3,000 consolidated claims.

The verdict was a defense result on the claims the jury reached, and an incomplete one. Jurors found that Bard and Becton Dickinson did not fail to warn adequately, did not fail to instruct, and did not commit consumer fraud. On the central Design Defect claim they deadlocked. That is not a finding for the defense; it is the absence of a finding, and it left the most valuable claim in the case unresolved.

The plaintiff has moved for a new trial. As reported, the motion attacks the jury instructions on design defect, on failure to warn or instruct, and on superseding cause, and it argues that the jury was put under time pressure because it had been told the trial would conclude by 8 May. The motion has not been reported as decided. That is a live variable rather than a footnote: if it is granted, a second infection case returns to the calendar and the October trial stops being the only test of the infection theory.

Two structural points explain the defense result better than the instructions do. First, in an infection case the Failure to Warn claim runs into the Learned Intermediary Doctrine with unusual force, because infection is a disclosed and clinically notorious risk of any indwelling vascular access device, and the implanting oncologist or interventional radiologist already knows it. A warning claim that asks a jury to believe an oncologist would have changed course had the label said more is a hard claim to win. Second, infection has a causation problem that fracture does not. A fragment of catheter lodged in a heart chamber is self-proving. An infection has to be attributed to the device rather than to a neutropenic cancer patient's own flora, the hospital environment, or the access procedure. Specific Causation carries a far heavier load in an infection case, and Cook is the first evidence of what that costs at trial.

How much was the Bard PowerPort verdict, and what did the jury refuse to give?

The Bard PowerPort verdict was $40m in compensatory damages, returned on 4 September 2026 by a nine-person federal jury in Phoenix after a trial that opened on 18 August 2026. Divelbliss was the second bellwether and the first catheter-fracture case in MDL 3081 to reach a jury. The plaintiff, a New Mexico woman, alleged that her port catheter fractured and that a fragment traveled to her heart, requiring removal; the device at issue was a PowerPort with a Groshong silicone catheter.

The findings are more instructive than the number, and no competing account sets them out claim by claim. The jury found unanimously for the plaintiff on strict liability design defect, on negligent design defect, on strict liability failure to warn, and on negligent failure to warn. It found no manufacturing defect. It rejected fraudulent concealment. And it declined to award Punitive Damages.

Claim	Cook (infection, May 2026)	Divelbliss (fracture, September 2026)
Design defect — strict liability	Hung	For plaintiff
Design defect — negligence	Hung	For plaintiff
Failure to warn	For defense	For plaintiff
Failure to instruct	For defense	Not separately reported
Manufacturing defect	Not reached	For defense
Consumer fraud / fraudulent concealment	For defense	For defense
Punitive damages	Not reached	Declined
Compensatory award	None	$40,000,000

Read together, the two verdicts describe a jury view that is neither a plaintiff rout nor a defense one. Two panels have now heard the corporate conduct evidence. Neither was willing to call it fraud, and the one that reached the question would not punish it. That is a meaningful data point for both sides, and it cuts against the assumption — common in the intake-page commentary — that the punitive exposure in this litigation is the driver.

It also matters that $40m is compensatory only. A compensatory verdict is not a payment. Post-trial motions for judgment as a matter of law, for a new trial and for remittitur run first, and an appeal can follow; that process routinely takes a year or more and can reduce, vacate or retry an award. Nothing about 4 September 2026 put money in anyone's hands.

When is the next Bard PowerPort bellwether trial, and what does it test?

The next Bard PowerPort bellwether trial begins on 13 October 2026. It is Lattanzio, an infection case brought by a Florida plaintiff who received her PowerPort in August 2013, and it is being tried on design defect, failure to warn, fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation, and fraudulent concealment.

Attorneys held a final pretrial conference ahead of the setting to resolve disputed facts, outstanding legal issues and pending motions that will govern what the jury sees. The proposed final pretrial order sets out the sequence of witnesses, depositions and exhibits, and counsel estimated the case will consume roughly 66 hours of courtroom time — a three-week trial on the same scale as the first two.

Three things make this setting the most consequential of the three.

It retests the losing theory. Infection lost in Cook on warnings and stalled on design. If an infection case can win in October on a record that a different jury has already seen a version of, the Cook result looks like a one-jury outcome and the infection inventory reprices upward. If Lattanzio loses cleanly — a defense verdict on design defect rather than a deadlock — then MDL 3081 has effectively become a fracture litigation with a large infection tail that will not carry trial value, and every valuation model in the case has to be rebuilt around that.

It has a twelve-year latency gap. An August 2013 implant puts a long interval between placement and suit, and long intervals bring the Statute of Limitations, the Discovery Rule and state-specific repose questions into play in a way the earlier bellwethers did not present as prominently. However the trial ends, the record it creates on when an infection injury is reasonably discoverable will be worked over by both sides in the cases behind it.

It carries the fraud claims forward. Lattanzio is pleading fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation alongside fraudulent concealment. Two juries have now declined to find concealment. A third refusal starts to look like a pattern that defense counsel can price; a finding the other way is the single most valuable thing the plaintiffs' side could take out of October, because it is the gateway to punitive exposure across the docket.

What does a bifurcated punitive damages phase mean for the October trial?

It means the jury will decide liability and compensatory damages first, and will only be asked about punitive damages afterward, in a separate phase, if the case gets that far. Counsel agreed that the trial will be divided into at least two phases, with punitive damages taken up later.

Bifurcation is a routine case-management device, and it is easy to read past. In a Mass Tort bellwether it is not neutral, and it tells you something about how both sides read the punitive record.

For the defense, bifurcation keeps the most inflammatory corporate-conduct evidence — internal knowledge of failure modes, complaint-handling, decisions not to change a design — out of the liability phase, or at least narrows the grounds on which it comes in. Agreeing to bifurcate is a signal that the defense expects that material to be admitted somewhere and would rather it arrive after the jury has already answered the questions that decide whether Bard loses at all. For the plaintiff, bifurcation is a trade: a cleaner liability phase, with less risk that a jury conflates outrage with defect, in exchange for losing the narrative arc that carries a jury from "this device failed" to "this company knew."

Neither earlier bellwether used this structure. Divelbliss put the punitive question to the same jury that had just found design defect and failure to warn, and that jury said no. Whether a jury insulated from the conduct evidence during liability behaves differently when it is finally shown that evidence is a genuinely open question, and October is the first look at the answer inside this MDL.

The practical read for anyone tracking the trial: a plaintiff verdict in phase one is not the end of the day, and a phase-two finding of malice or conscious disregard would be the first in this litigation. That second number, if it exists, is the one that moves settlement posture.

The gating question the coverage misses: general causation and Daubert

None of the competing pages on this litigation addresses the procedural question that determines whether trials four, five and six happen at all.

Daubert and summary judgment briefing in MDL 3081 has been completed on General Causation and on five of the six bellwether cases, and Judge Campbell has been issuing rulings on a rolling basis. That is the gate. A Daubert Challenge to the plaintiffs' general-causation experts — the witnesses who say this class of device, by reason of its polyurethane and barium sulfate composition, degrades, fractures or harbors biofilm at rates that cause the injuries alleged — is not a case-specific problem. If a general-causation opinion is excluded for a whole injury theory, the theory does not survive in any case in the docket, whatever a Phoenix jury said in September.

That asymmetry is worth stating plainly, because it is the single most misunderstood feature of MDL practice among claimants. A verdict binds the parties to that trial. An exclusion order on general causation reaches every case on the transferee docket. The $40m in Divelbliss is evidence about what a jury will do with a fracture record; a ruling from Judge Campbell on the admissibility of the science behind that record is worth more, in inventory terms, than the verdict.

For defense counsel the corollary is the reason to keep briefing even after an adverse verdict: the trial loss and the Daubert posture are on separate tracks, and the second track has not closed.

How many Bard PowerPort lawsuits are pending, and is there a settlement?

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) pending-MDL report dated 1 September 2026 put the docket at roughly 3,700 actions in the District of Arizona. Trackers differ at the margins — some describe "nearly 4,000" federal claims, others separate pending from total filings — and the number moves every month as direct filings arrive, so any single figure should be read as a snapshot rather than a census. There are also claims proceeding in state courts that the federal count does not capture.

There is no Global Settlement. No settlement program, Settlement Matrix, registry or aggregate figure has been announced in this litigation, and the dollar ranges published on intake and "settlement amount" pages are projections built from other litigations, not terms anyone has agreed. Practitioners reading those pages should treat the numbers as advertising rather than data.

What exists instead is the ordinary pre-settlement architecture of a device MDL at this stage: a bellwether programme running to at least three more settings, Daubert rulings issuing on a rolling basis, and post-trial motions pending on two verdicts. Those are the inputs that produce a settlement. The sequence in comparable device dockets is consistent — a manufacturer with a split scorecard and unresolved science does not capitalize a program; a manufacturer facing consecutive plaintiff verdicts on both injury tracks, with an adverse general-causation ruling behind it, does.

On the current record Becton Dickinson has one defense verdict, one adverse compensatory verdict with no punitive finding, a hung jury on the claim that matters most, and open Daubert briefing. That is not a settlement posture. Two more plaintiff verdicts would be.

Does the $40 million verdict mean every Bard PowerPort case is worth $40 million?

No, and the gap between the verdict and any individual Claim Value is wide enough that it is worth setting out why.

A bellwether verdict is a sample, not a schedule. Divelbliss was selected into the bellwether pool precisely because it was a representative and well-developed fracture case with documented migration to the heart and surgical removal. Cases with milder injury, incomplete Product Identification, gaps in the Plaintiff Fact Sheet (PFS), comorbidity-heavy medical histories, or limitations exposure do not carry that value and never did.

Four discounts apply to any translation from verdict to claim value. The award is compensatory only and subject to post-trial motions and appeal, so its present value is not $40m. It reflects one state's damages law, applied to one plaintiff's injuries, by one jury. It says nothing about the infection cohort, which has no plaintiff verdict at all. And it precedes any aggregate resolution, where the economics are set by cohort tiers rather than by the best case in the pool — a Settlement Matrix built after a split scorecard will separate fracture from infection, and will tier within each by injury severity, surgical intervention and documentation quality.

The honest version, for a claimant reading about a $40m number: it establishes that a federal jury will find this device defectively designed on a fracture record, which is genuinely new information and improves the negotiating position of the whole fracture cohort. It does not establish what any particular case is worth, and it does not establish anything at all about infection claims.

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

For claimants' counsel, the October trial is a cohort event rather than a case event. Firms holding mixed inventory should already be segmenting it: fracture cases now sit behind a plaintiff verdict with findings on both design defect and failure to warn; infection cases sit behind a defense verdict on warnings and an unresolved design claim. Those are two different assets and should be worked, documented and reserved differently. The August 2013 implant date in Lattanzio is also a prompt to audit limitations exposure across infection files now, before a trial record on discoverability exists to be used against them.

For defense counsel, the useful reading of the scorecard is that the conduct case has not landed. Two juries have declined to find concealment and the one that reached punitive damages refused them. That is the evidentiary posture to protect, and bifurcation in October is consistent with protecting it. The parallel point is that the Daubert track remains the highest-leverage work in the docket, because a general-causation exclusion reaches cases a verdict cannot touch.

For funders and portfolio buyers, this is a litigation where the headline number and the underlying risk are badly misaligned. Third-Party Litigation Funding priced off a $40m compensatory verdict ignores that the verdict is unpaid, unappealed, punitive-free, and specific to one of two injury theories. The variables that actually move the portfolio are the Cook new-trial ruling, the rolling Daubert orders, and whether an infection case can win in October. A funder underwriting this docket before 13 October is underwriting a coin flip on half the inventory.

There is also a quieter economic point that three trials in five months brings forward. Trying bellwethers is expensive, and in an MDL that cost is carried by leadership and recovered later from the Common Benefit Fund, as an assessment on every case that resolves — including cases whose own lawyers never set foot in Phoenix. Firms that have been accumulating Bard PowerPort inventory on a Contingency Fee without contributing to the work product should be modelling that assessment now rather than discovering it at distribution, and claimants should understand that the common benefit holdback sits alongside any Medical Lien in the arithmetic between a gross settlement and a net payment.

For all three, the calendar is the discipline. Three trial settings in five months — 13 October 2026, 1 December 2026 and 2 February 2027 — will generate more information about this litigation than the preceding three years did.

Frequently asked questions

When is the next Bard PowerPort bellwether trial?

The third bellwether trial is scheduled to begin on 13 October 2026 before Judge David G. Campbell in the District of Arizona. It is an infection case brought by May Lattanzio of Florida, who received her implanted port in August 2013, and it is bifurcated so that punitive damages, if reached, are decided in a separate later phase. Further trials have been reported for 1 December 2026 and 2 February 2027.

How much was the Bard PowerPort verdict?

A nine-person federal jury in Phoenix awarded $40m in compensatory damages on 4 September 2026 in Divelbliss v. Becton, Dickinson, the second bellwether and the first catheter-fracture case in MDL 3081 to reach a jury. The jury found strict liability and negligent design defect and strict liability and negligent failure to warn, rejected manufacturing defect and fraudulent concealment, and declined to award punitive damages.

Why did the first Bard PowerPort bellwether trial end in a defense verdict?

The Cook trial, an infection case that opened on 21 April 2026, produced defense findings on failure to warn, failure to instruct and consumer fraud, and a deadlock on design defect. The plaintiff has moved for a new trial, arguing that the instructions on design defect, failure to warn or instruct and superseding cause were confusing and that the jury was pressed for time; that motion has not been reported as decided.

Is there a Bard PowerPort settlement?

No global settlement, settlement program or settlement matrix has been announced in MDL 3081. Dollar ranges published on intake and "settlement amount" pages are projections rather than agreed terms. The litigation is still in its bellwether phase, with post-trial motions pending on two verdicts and Daubert and summary judgment rulings issuing on a rolling basis.

How many Bard PowerPort lawsuits are pending?

The JPML pending-MDL report dated 1 September 2026 put In re Bard Implanted Port Catheter Products Liability Litigation at roughly 3,700 actions in the District of Arizona, with additional claims filed in state courts. The federal figure moves monthly as direct filings arrive, and trackers reporting "nearly 4,000" are counting later filings against the same docket.

Does the $40 million verdict mean every Bard PowerPort case is worth $40 million?

No. A bellwether verdict is a sample of how one jury valued one well-documented fracture case under one state's damages law. It is compensatory only, unpaid pending post-trial motions and any appeal, and it says nothing about infection claims, which have no plaintiff verdict. Individual claim values turn on injury severity, surgical intervention, product identification, documentation and limitations exposure.

What does bifurcation mean for the October trial?

The jury will decide liability and compensatory damages in a first phase, and punitive damages only afterward in a separate phase if the case reaches that point. The structure keeps the corporate-conduct evidence out of the liability phase or narrows it, which benefits the defense on liability, and it costs the plaintiff the narrative continuity that normally carries a jury from defect to punishment.