Filshie Clip Lawsuit: Connecticut Judge Sends Six-Woman Bellwether Toward Trial on Failure to Warn

A Connecticut Superior Court judge ruled that federal law does not preempt the failure-to-warn claims of six women in a Filshie Clip bellwether case against CooperSurgical Inc., denying the device distributor early wins on several claims and sending the case toward trial, according to a Law360 report published November 3, 2026. The decision makes the Waterbury complex litigation docket the most important forum in the Filshie Clip lawsuit landscape, because it is one of the few places where migration claims over the titanium tubal ligation clip are surviving the preemption defense that has ended most federal cases.

The ruling does not decide whether the clip is defective or whether CooperSurgical's warnings were adequate. It decides something narrower and, for this litigation, more consequential: that a jury in Connecticut may hear those questions at all. Since 2022, federal judges in Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Missouri, Ohio and Texas have held most Filshie theories preempted by the Medical Device Amendments of 1976. A state court in CooperSurgical's home state, applying a state supreme court precedent that federal courts elsewhere do not share, has now taken a different path for the bellwether group.

What did the Connecticut judge decide in the Filshie Clip bellwether case?

The public account of the November 3 ruling comes from Law360's report, headlined "Birth Control Clip Maker Must Face Injury Case Trial." It states that CooperSurgical, the medical device importer and distributor for the Filshie Clip, failed to secure quick wins on several claims in a bellwether product liability case, and that the Connecticut state judge held that federal law does not preempt the six women's failure-to-warn allegations. The full order was not available for review when this article was published, so its exact procedural posture, any claims narrowed or abandoned, and any trial date are not stated here.

Three things are nonetheless clear from the reporting and from the docket's history:

• The bellwether group is six plaintiffs. The ruling applies to the six women selected for the first trial track in the consolidated Connecticut proceeding, not to every Filshie claimant in the state.
• Failure to Warn survives. The core claim, that CooperSurgical did not adequately warn physicians and patients that clips can migrate out of the fallopian tube and into the abdomen, pelvis or elsewhere, is going forward.
• The case is headed to trial. Law360's headline frames the outcome as CooperSurgical being required to face trial. No other Filshie Clip lawsuit in the country is publicly reported to be this close to a jury.

For a mass tort that has been defined by early dismissals, a bellwether trial is a structural change. A Bellwether Trial does not bind other plaintiffs, but its verdict, whatever it is, will be the first jury valuation of a Filshie migration claim and will shape every settlement conversation that follows.

How the Connecticut Filshie Clip lawsuit docket got here

The Connecticut cases are consolidated as In re 2024 Connecticut Filshie Clip Litigation, Docket No. X10-UWY-CV-24-5036034-S, on the complex litigation docket for the Judicial District of Waterbury. A December 31, 2024 order placed the 2024 Filshie Clip actions on that docket and gave them the collective caption. Connecticut is a natural forum: CooperSurgical is headquartered in Trumbull, Connecticut, which removes the personal jurisdiction fights that have trimmed Filshie cases elsewhere.

The November 3 ruling is the latest in a sequence of orders that has steadily narrowed, but not ended, the Connecticut claims.

Date	Court / order	What happened	Effect on plaintiffs
Aug. 29, 2023	Utah state court	Dismissed a 50-claimant Filshie complaint with prejudice, reportedly for lack of subject matter jurisdiction on preemption grounds	Set up later preclusion fights in Connecticut
Dec. 31, 2024	Conn. Superior Court, Waterbury	Placed the 2024 Filshie actions on the complex litigation docket	Created the consolidated In re 2024 Connecticut Filshie Clip Litigation
Dec. 10, 2025	Conn. Superior Court, Waterbury	Dismissed negligence and product liability claims of 49 plaintiffs, relying on the Utah dismissal	Claimants who lost in Utah could not relitigate in Connecticut
Aug. 11, 2026	Conn. Superior Court, Waterbury	Struck Design Defect claims as expressly preempted; kept failure-to-warn and Punitive Damages claims; per Mealey's, kept failure-to-report claims	Narrowed the case to warning-based theories
Nov. 3, 2026 (reported)	Conn. Superior Court, Waterbury	Held six bellwether plaintiffs' failure-to-warn claims not preempted; denied CooperSurgical early wins on several claims	Bellwether moves toward trial

The December 2025 order is the one defense counsel will cite most often outside the bellwether. HarrisMartin reported that the judge dismissed 49 plaintiffs' negligence and product liability claims because a Utah court had already dismissed them with prejudice, having concluded that it lacked subject matter jurisdiction because the claims were preempted by federal law. Utah Medical Products, the parent of manufacturer Femcare Ltd., had told investors that the Utah complaint, filed on behalf of 50 claimants, was the only Filshie suit then pending in state court and that it was dismissed on August 29, 2023. The Connecticut court's willingness to give that dismissal preclusive effect means a plaintiff's litigation history matters as much as her medical history.

The August 11, 2026 order set the frame for the bellwether. According to HarrisMartin's August 21 report, Judge Pierson struck the design defect claims against CooperSurgical because the plaintiffs did not allege that the clip's design departed from the requirements the FDA imposed through premarket approval, and kept the failure-to-warn and punitive damages claims because they rest on traditional state tort law. Mealey's described the same order as holding that design defect claims are preempted but that claims based on the company's alleged failure to report adverse events to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are not. The November 3 ruling extends that reasoning to the specific records of the six bellwether plaintiffs.

Are Filshie Clip failure-to-warn claims preempted by federal law?

In most federal courts that have ruled, yes; in Connecticut state court, the bellwether plaintiffs' warning claims are not. The answer turns on how a court characterizes the warning claim.

The Filshie Clip is a Class III device that reached the U.S. market through premarket approval (PMA), the FDA's most demanding pathway. Court filings describe Femcare seeking PMA in 1992 and the FDA granting it in 1996, and courts have repeatedly noted that the approval has never been suspended or withdrawn and that the clip's design has always matched the approved design. That history triggers two separate preemption doctrines, both covered by the glossary entry on Preemption (Products):

1. Express preemption under Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc. (2008). Section 360k(a) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act bars state requirements that are "different from, or in addition to" federal requirements for a PMA device. A claim that the FDA-approved label should have said something more is, on its face, a demand for a different label. That is why the Connecticut court struck design defect claims: a jury finding that the approved design was defective would impose a requirement the FDA did not.
2. Implied preemption under Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs' Legal Committee (2001). Only the federal government may enforce the FDCA. A claim that exists solely because federal law requires something, such as filing Medical Device Reports with the FDA, risks being treated as a private enforcement action and impliedly preempted.

Plaintiffs thread between the two by pleading a "parallel claim," recognized in Medtronic, Inc. v. Lohr (1996) and preserved in Riegel: a state-law duty that mirrors, rather than adds to, a federal requirement. The classic Filshie version runs like this. Federal regulations require manufacturers to report adverse events, including migration, to the FDA. Plaintiffs allege the defendants underreported migrations. Had they reported, the argument goes, the FDA's public adverse-event database and the medical literature would have reflected the true risk, and implanting physicians would have known. The state-law hook is the ordinary duty to warn; the federal requirement is the standard that measures whether it was breached.

Whether that theory survives depends on whether state law independently recognizes a duty to warn through reports to a regulator. That is where Connecticut differs.

Why Connecticut law changes the Filshie preemption analysis

In Glover v. Bausch & Lomb, Inc., 343 Conn. 513 (2022), decided June 7, 2022 on questions certified by the Second Circuit, the Connecticut Supreme Court held that the Connecticut Product Liability Act can encompass a manufacturer's duty to report adverse events to the FDA where reporting is the means of warning the person or entity best positioned to prevent the harm. The court tied that duty to federal law, observing that a manufacturer would have no such state-law duty absent the federal reporting requirement, but it recognized the claim as a species of failure to warn under state law. The Second Circuit applied those answers on remand in Glover v. Bausch & Lomb, Inc., 43 F.4th 304 (2d Cir. 2022).

Glover also contained a defense win: the court held that the CPLA's exclusivity provision barred the plaintiff's Connecticut Unfair Trade Practices Act claim for marketing an allegedly defective product. For Filshie plaintiffs, that means Connecticut offers a viable warning theory but channels it through the CPLA rather than consumer protection law.

The significance for the Filshie Clip lawsuit docket is direct. A Buckman argument is strongest where state law has never recognized the duty a plaintiff invokes, because the claim then looks like it exists only because of the FDCA. In Connecticut, the state's highest court has said the duty exists as a matter of state product liability law. That gives a Connecticut trial judge a principled basis to treat a failure-to-report-based warning claim as parallel rather than impliedly preempted, the result Mealey's reported in the August order and that the November 3 ruling extends to the bellwether.

Defense-side commentators have long argued that Glover sits uneasily with Buckman, since a duty to report to the FDA is difficult to separate from the FDCA itself. That disagreement is the likeliest issue for appellate review if the bellwether produces a plaintiff's verdict.

Why do Filshie Clip lawsuits keep getting dismissed in federal court?

Federal courts outside Connecticut have largely held that Filshie warning and design claims are expressly preempted under Riegel, and that failure-to-report claims are either expressly preempted or impliedly preempted under Buckman because the forum state recognizes no independent duty to report to a regulator. The scorecard below draws on reported decisions.

Case / court	Year	Outcome	Theory
Mack v. CooperSurgical (M.D. Ala., No. 1:22-cv-54-RAH)	2023	Motion to dismiss denied	Claims neither expressly nor impliedly preempted at pleading stage
Bulox v. CooperSurgical (S.D. Tex., No. 4:21-cv-02320)	2025	Design claims preempted	Plaintiffs did not plead design other than as FDA approved (Riegel)
Bergdoll v. CooperSurgical (W.D. Mo.)	—	Failure-to-report claims preempted	Private FDCA enforcement barred by Buckman
Rebando v. CooperSurgical (M.D. Fla.)	2024	Summary judgment for defendants	Adverse-event reporting theory preempted
N.D. Ga. (Judge Leigh Martin May)	Aug. 8, 2025	Dismissed	Warning and defect claims preempted; no evidence of deviation from FDA specifications; marketing not linked to injury
Wilson v. CooperSurgical (S.D. Ill.)	Sept. 9, 2025	Summary judgment for defendants	Failure-to-report claims expressly and impliedly preempted
M.D. Fla. (following Rebando)	Apr. 2026	Dismissed	Preempted
D.R.I.	—	Design and manufacturing claims dismissed	Failure-to-warn and negligence claims kept
Conn. Superior Court, Waterbury (bellwether)	Nov. 3, 2026	Failure-to-warn claims not preempted	Parallel state duty recognized in Glover

The Wilson decision is instructive. The Drug & Device Law Blog reported that the Southern District of Illinois found the failure-to-report claims both expressly and impliedly preempted, and departed from an earlier Illinois federal ruling, Laverty, in light of an intervening Illinois appellate decision, Norabuena. The lesson is that Filshie outcomes track each state's law on whether a duty to report to the FDA exists independently of federal law. Where a state appellate court has rejected that duty, federal courts follow; where the state's supreme court has recognized it, as in Connecticut, the parallel-claim path stays open.

Statutes of limitations have done the rest. An Alabama federal judge dismissed one Filshie suit in 2024 as time-barred under the state's two-year Statute of Limitations, finding no fraudulent concealment that would toll it. Because Filshie Clips are implanted during sterilization procedures and migration symptoms can emerge years later, the Discovery Rule and any Statute of Repose are recurring battlegrounds.

Utah Medical Products' own scorecard is stark. In its annual report covering 2025, the company stated that as of January 2026, fourteen of the nineteen courts around the country where Filshie cases had been filed had dismissed them, and four more were awaiting decisions on its summary judgment motions. Its June 30, 2026 quarterly report repeated that the company does not expect the Filshie litigation outcome to be material to its consolidated financial results. Search summaries of that filing put first-half 2026 litigation expense at about $935,000.

Who makes the Filshie Clip and who is being sued?

Femcare Ltd., a UK-based company, manufactures the Filshie Clip and holds the U.S. premarket approval; Utah Medical Products, Inc. (Nasdaq: UTMD) is Femcare's parent. Upon receiving PMA, Femcare entered an exclusive U.S. distribution agreement with CooperSurgical, Inc., a subsidiary of The Cooper Companies, Inc. Complaints routinely name all four: a Michigan woman's migration complaint in Connecticut Superior Court, reported by AboutLawsuits on September 30, 2026, named CooperSurgical, The Cooper Companies, Femcare and Utah Medical Products.

In the consolidated Connecticut litigation, CooperSurgical is the defendant facing the bellwether, and plaintiff-side summaries describe it as the sole remaining defendant there. Personal jurisdiction has shaped the roster: in 2024, a Connecticut judge granted dismissal motions by several corporate defendants in an earlier consolidated action brought by 103 women, none of them Connecticut residents. For UTMD, the distinction between manufacturer and distributor matters commercially, but the preemption analysis is the same for both, because both rely on the same PMA.

What is Filshie Clip migration, and how common is it?

The Filshie Clip is a small titanium clamp lined with silicone rubber that is applied to each fallopian tube during laparoscopic tubal ligation. Over time the tube beneath the clip is meant to scar closed and the clip is meant to remain in place, encased in tissue. Migration occurs when a clip detaches and moves through the abdominal or pelvic cavity; plaintiffs allege migrated clips have caused chronic abdominal and pelvic pain and required additional surgery to locate and remove them.

The rate is the central factual dispute. The FDA-approved labeling discloses an adverse clip migration rate of 0.13% from clinical trials, with asymptomatic migration at an unknown frequency. A 2021 revision of the instructions for use retained the 0.13% figure but described it as symptomatic migration. Plaintiffs point to a 2002 statement attributed to inventor G. Marcus Filshie that "over 25% of patients will experience a migration of one or more Clips." Courts have treated that figure as an allegation, not an established rate, and the gap between 0.13% and 25% is exactly what a failure-to-warn jury would be asked to evaluate. Whether a warning that a risk exists, but understates its frequency, is adequate under the CPLA is the merits question the bellwether will reach.

Is there a Filshie Clip class action or MDL?

No. There is no federal Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) and no certified class action for Filshie Clip injuries. Claims proceed as individual lawsuits in federal districts across the country, as multi-plaintiff actions in a handful of state courts, and, in the largest concentration, on Connecticut's complex litigation docket. That structure is why the Connecticut bellwether matters so much: without a Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) order centralizing the federal cases, there is no single transferee judge whose rulings set the terms of the Mass Tort nationally, and outcomes depend on each forum's state law.

The absence of an MDL also cuts against settlement. MDL bellwethers and Global Settlement programs tend to arrive together, because a transferee court creates a common inventory and common deadlines. Filshie claims have instead been resolved one forum at a time, mostly by dismissal. A trial in Waterbury could change the incentives, particularly if plaintiffs' counsel begin steering new filings to Connecticut, where CooperSurgical is at home and Glover applies.

When will the first Filshie Clip lawsuit go to trial?

No trial date for the six-plaintiff bellwether has been publicly reported. The November 3 ruling clears the principal pretrial obstacle, and Law360 framed the result as CooperSurgical being required to face trial, but the scheduling order, any remaining motions in limine and any expert challenges were not described in the public reporting. Because the bellwether involves six plaintiffs, whether their claims are tried together or in sequence is itself an open question; multi-plaintiff device trials invite defense arguments about jury confusion and prejudice that CooperSurgical may press before a date is set.

What it means for plaintiffs' counsel, defendants and device litigators

For plaintiffs' counsel and PI firms. The ruling makes forum selection the decisive variable in a Filshie Clip lawsuit. Connecticut offers general jurisdiction over CooperSurgical and a state supreme court precedent recognizing failure-to-report-based warning duties. It also carries a trap: the December 2025 order shows the Waterbury court will give preclusive effect to prior dismissals elsewhere, so claimants who already lost in Utah or federal court cannot start over in Connecticut. Pleading matters as well. Design defect theories that do not allege a deviation from the approved design are being struck, so warning claims built on specific, documented underreporting carry the case.

For CooperSurgical, Femcare and Utah Medical. The defense record outside Connecticut remains strong, and the November 3 ruling does not change federal law. But a trial creates verdict risk the companies have so far avoided, and a plaintiff's verdict would test Glover on appeal in the state where CooperSurgical is headquartered. UTMD's disclosure that it does not expect the litigation to be material was written before any Filshie case reached a jury.

For medical device litigators generally. The Filshie docket is a clean illustration of how Buckman preemption depends on state law. Defendants with PMA devices should expect plaintiffs to seek out states whose courts recognize a duty to report to regulators; Connecticut joins the small group of jurisdictions where that duty has supreme court support. Plaintiffs in other PMA device cases, from implanted ports to spinal cord stimulators, will cite the Connecticut orders to argue that failure-to-report claims are parallel rather than preempted.

For funders and case acquirers. Portfolio valuations for Filshie inventories have been discounted for preemption risk. A Connecticut bellwether is the first data point that could justify a different discount for Connecticut-filed claims than for federal ones, though a single state trial-court ruling, unreviewed on appeal, is a thin basis for repricing a docket.

Frequently asked questions

What did the court decide in the Filshie Clip bellwether case?

A Connecticut Superior Court judge held, in a ruling reported November 3, 2026, that federal law does not preempt six bellwether plaintiffs' failure-to-warn claims against CooperSurgical, denying the company early wins on several claims and moving the case toward trial.

Are Filshie Clip lawsuits still being filed?

Yes. New complaints continued to be filed in 2026, including a Connecticut Superior Court complaint by a Michigan woman, reported in September 2026, alleging a clip migrated from her fallopian tube into her abdomen; whether any individual claim is timely depends on the applicable statute of limitations and discovery rule.

Why were the design defect claims thrown out?

The Connecticut court struck design defect claims in August 2026 as expressly preempted under Riegel v. Medtronic, because the plaintiffs did not allege that the clip departed from the design the FDA approved through premarket approval.

Does the Connecticut ruling help Filshie plaintiffs in other states?

Only indirectly. It is a state trial-court ruling grounded in Connecticut law, particularly Glover v. Bausch & Lomb, and it does not bind federal courts or courts in other states, most of which have held Filshie claims preempted.

Has there been a Filshie Clip settlement?

No global settlement or settlement program for Filshie Clip claims has been publicly reported, and Utah Medical Products has told investors it does not expect the litigation to have a material effect on its consolidated results.

How common is Filshie Clip migration?

The FDA-approved labeling cites a 0.13% symptomatic migration rate from clinical trials, while plaintiffs cite a 2002 statement by the clip's inventor estimating that more than 25% of patients experience migration of at least one clip; that disputed range is central to the failure-to-warn claims.