The Spinal Cord Stimulator MDL Is Splitting by Manufacturer and the JPML Decides the Next Two

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) hears argument in Chicago on Thursday 24 September 2026 on whether Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator claims should each be centralized in a docket of their own, four months after the Panel looked at the same device category and declined to build one industry-wide proceeding. The result is that the spinal cord stimulator MDL is not a single litigation at all but a set of manufacturer-specific dockets being assembled one company at a time, and as of this week exactly one of them exists: MDL No. 3181, holding 29 Boston Scientific actions in the Central District of California.

That structure is the story, and it is the thing the first page of search results for this litigation does not explain. Intake pages report that an MDL was created and that some manufacturers were left out. The more useful question for anyone holding a claim is why the Panel drew the line where it did, what it takes to move a second or third manufacturer across that line, and what happens to a case filed in the gap.

The Panel already said no once

The sequence matters because it shows the Panel narrowing a request rather than granting or denying it.

The first motion, filed on 20 February 2026 by plaintiffs in fifteen pending cases, asked for a single spinal cord stimulator MDL covering the federal claims as a category. The theory was intuitive. Spinal cord stimulators are implanted neuromodulation devices sold by a handful of manufacturers into the same clinical market, for the same indication — chronic back, neck and limb pain, frequently after failed spine surgery — and the injuries alleged across brands look similar from a distance: lead migration and fracture, painful or uncontrolled stimulation, burns and shocks, loss of therapeutic effect, infection, nerve injury, and revision or explant surgery. The Associated Press reported that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had received more than 80,000 injury reports associated with these devices between 2008 and 2018, the third-highest total of any medical device category the agency tracks. On volume alone the category looks like a Mass Tort.

The Panel heard argument on 28 May 2026 and issued its transfer order on 5 June 2026. It centralized the Boston Scientific actions and nothing else.

Why did the JPML refuse to create one industry-wide spinal cord stimulator MDL?

Because similarity of injury is not the test. Section 1407 asks whether civil actions involve one or more common questions of fact, and whether transfer will serve the convenience of parties and witnesses and promote the just and efficient conduct of the actions. The Panel's reasoning, as reported by the practitioners who argued and covered the motion, turned on four points, and each of them is portable to the next device-category petition that comes along.

First, the plaintiffs alleged parallel conduct, not concerted conduct. Nobody claimed the manufacturers acted together. Absent a conspiracy or joint-venture theory, there is no shared factual narrative about what the defendants did — only a set of separate narratives that happen to rhyme.

Second, each manufacturer sells its own device line. Boston Scientific's claims concern the Precision, WaveWriter and WaveWriter Alpha systems; Abbott's concern the Proclaim family and the Eterna platform; Nevro's concern the Senza and HFX systems. The engineering questions that decide a Design Defect claim — lead anchoring, connector architecture, pulse generator behavior, charging systems, programming software — resolve at the level of the individual product, not the category.

Third, each device line carries its own regulatory history. What the manufacturer told the FDA, what the agency required, what the labeling said and when it changed are the spine of a Failure to Warn case, and none of that record is shared across companies.

Fourth, and following from the other three, manufacturer conduct discovery would not overlap. The custodians, the design history files, the complaint-handling records, the sales and training materials and the corporate witnesses are different for every defendant. An industry-wide docket would have produced four parallel discovery tracks supervised by one judge, which is coordination without economy.

What the Panel left standing was the one thing that genuinely is common: the general clinical and scientific background of neuromodulation for chronic pain. That is Science Day material. It is not, on this Panel's view, a basis for centralization.

Is there a spinal cord stimulator MDL, and what is MDL 3181?

Yes, but only for one manufacturer. MDL No. 3181, In re Boston Scientific Corporation Spinal Cord Stimulator Products Liability Litigation, was created on 5 June 2026 and assigned to Judge Josephine L. Staton in the Central District of California. At creation the Panel counted 23 actions pending in nine districts, fourteen of them already in the Central District of California and ten of those already coordinated before Judge Staton — an unusually clean case for transferee selection, since the proposed forum already held a majority of the inventory and the proposed judge was already managing it.

The docket has moved quickly by MDL standards. An initial scheduling conference was held on 5 August 2026. On 13 August 2026 the court appointed nineteen attorneys to leadership: three co-lead counsel, a plaintiffs' liaison counsel, a four-member executive committee, a six-member steering committee and a five-attorney leadership development committee. In late August the court entered a direct-filing order allowing new Boston Scientific cases to be filed straight into the Central District of California rather than filed at home and tagged for transfer. Sources differ on whether that order issued on 18 or 31 August 2026; the operative text should be confirmed from the docket.

By the September 2026 pending-MDL report the docket stood at 29 actions, none closed.

MDL 3181 milestone	Date
Industry-wide centralization motion filed	20 February 2026
JPML oral argument	28 May 2026
Transfer order creating MDL 3181	5 June 2026
Initial scheduling conference	5 August 2026
Leadership order appointing 19 attorneys	13 August 2026
Direct-filing order entered	Late August 2026
Pending actions on the September 2026 report	29

Three of those entries deserve emphasis. Leadership appointed within ten weeks of transfer means the Common Benefit Fund architecture and the assessment percentage will be set early, which matters to every firm that later files into the docket. A direct-filing order at the two-month mark means the court expects volume and has decided not to spend judicial time on transfer mechanics. And a docket that grew only from 23 to 29 actions in three months is small — far smaller than the adverse-event numbers would suggest, and a reminder that reported device failures and filed federal lawsuits are different populations.

What the devices are, and what patients allege

A spinal cord stimulator is a permanently implanted neuromodulation system: a pulse generator placed under the skin, usually in the buttock or flank, wired to one or more electrode leads threaded into the epidural space along the spinal cord. The generator delivers electrical pulses intended to interfere with pain signaling. Patients typically arrive at the device after other treatments have failed, and a large share of implants follow unsuccessful spine surgery. Most systems are trialed percutaneously for a week or so before permanent implantation, and most are rechargeable, which introduces a charging system and its own failure modes.

Three features of that design explain why the litigation looks the way it does. The device is implanted, so a failure is corrected by surgery rather than by replacement. It is electrical, so a malfunction can injure rather than merely stop working. And it is programmable and network-connected in its modern generations, so software behavior sits alongside hardware in the defect analysis.

The injuries alleged across the four manufacturers' dockets fall into recognizable groups: leads that migrate from their implanted position or fracture, producing loss of therapy or stimulation in the wrong place; unwanted, painful or uncontrolled stimulation, including reports of shocks and burns; charging and battery problems; infection at the generator pocket or along the lead tract; nerve or spinal cord injury ranging from weakness and numbness to paralysis; and, most commonly, the need for revision or explant surgery with a return to the pain state and, frequently, to opioid therapy the device was meant to replace.

That last category is the one that gives the litigation its damages structure. A revision or explant is a documented, dated surgical event with a medical record behind it, which makes causation and damages tractable in a way that a claim of diminished efficacy is not. It is also the fact pattern most likely to recur across every brand, which is why the plaintiffs' bar treated the category as a single Mass Tort in February and why the Panel's refusal to do the same was not obvious in advance.

What none of that resolves is the defect question, and the defect question is where the manufacturers diverge. A lead that migrates raises questions about anchoring design and implantation technique. A charging burn raises questions about thermal management and about what the labeling told the patient. Overstimulation raises questions about firmware and about the programming interface the clinician used. These are different engineering records held by different companies, and they are the reason the Panel treated four sets of devices as four litigations.

The four dockets, side by side

Manufacturer	Devices at issue	Federal posture as of 19 September 2026	Forum	Judge
Boston Scientific	Precision, WaveWriter, WaveWriter Alpha	Centralized. MDL No. 3181, created 5 June 2026; 29 actions pending; leadership appointed; direct filing permitted	C.D. Cal.	Josephine L. Staton
Abbott	Proclaim, Proclaim Plus, Proclaim XR, Proclaim DRG, Eterna	Petition pending as MDL No. 3194, filed 22 June 2026, opposed by Abbott; argument 24 September 2026. Roughly two dozen claims reported nationwide	Requested; undecided	None assigned
Nevro	Senza, HFX	Petition pending as MDL No. 3195, filed 26 June 2026 by eight plaintiffs covering 17 actions; opposed by Nevro on 6 August 2026; argument 24 September 2026. Petitioners ask for C.D. Cal. and Judge Staton	Requested; undecided	None assigned
Medtronic	Various neuromodulation systems	No MDL and no reported pending petition. Claims proceed individually in the districts where filed	Dispersed	Various

Read across the table and the practical asymmetry is obvious. A Boston Scientific claimant has a single address, a leadership structure, a Plaintiff Fact Sheet regime and the beginnings of a common discovery record. An Abbott, Nevro or Medtronic claimant has a case in a district court with no coordination, no leadership, no common benefit structure, and a judge who has never seen another one of these cases.

Will Abbott and Nevro spinal cord stimulator cases get their own MDLs?

The Panel's own June reasoning supplies most of the answer, and it points different ways for the two petitions.

The June order did not say that Abbott and Nevro claims are unsuitable for centralization. It said they are unsuitable for centralization together with each other and with Boston Scientific. A manufacturer-specific petition removes precisely the defect the Panel identified: within one manufacturer's docket the device line is common, the regulatory history is common, and the conduct discovery is a single track. That is the ordinary shape of a device MDL and the Panel grants that shape routinely.

Both defendants are nonetheless opposing. Nevro filed its opposition on 6 August 2026, arguing that the claims do not share sufficiently common questions of defect and injury to justify coordinated pretrial proceedings. Abbott opposes as well. The argument available to both is the mirror image of the argument that defeated the industry-wide motion, pitched one level down: that "spinal cord stimulator injury" is not a single factual question even within one company's portfolio, because a lead migration case, a charging-system burn case, a software-driven overstimulation case and an infection case share a device brand and very little else.

That argument has real force in this device category and weak force before this Panel. The JPML has repeatedly centralized device litigation in which the alleged failure modes are heterogeneous, on the reasoning that a common defendant, a common design history and a common regulatory file supply the factual overlap Section 1407 requires, and that the differences are case-management problems for the transferee judge rather than reasons to refuse transfer.

The more serious obstacle is numbers and dispersion. Seventeen Nevro actions and roughly two dozen Abbott claims are modest inventories. The Panel has granted centralization on smaller sets — it created MDL 3181 on 23 actions — but small dockets invite the response that informal coordination under Rule 42, or simple cooperation among a handful of judges, would do the same work without transfer. Where the claims sit geographically is therefore the pivotal fact, and it is the fact that decided the Abbott petition the first time.

The geographic problem that sank the first Abbott motion

The June order's treatment of Abbott is the most instructive part of the whole sequence and the part no competing page explains.

The Panel did not reject the Abbott claims on the merits of the common-question analysis. It rejected them because the Abbott actions identified in the motion were all pending in the Northern District of Illinois. Section 1407 authorizes transfer of "civil actions involving one or more common questions of fact... pending in different districts." Actions already sitting in a single district are not scattered, and there is nothing to gather. A judge in the Northern District of Illinois can consolidate them under Rule 42(a) and manage them as a group without the Panel's help. The Panel also made clear that the ruling carried no prejudice: if more Abbott cases were filed in other districts, the question could be revisited.

That is a road map, and the 22 June petition follows it. Whether it succeeds turns on whether the Abbott inventory has genuinely dispersed since February — whether there are now Abbott actions in a meaningful number of districts outside the Northern District of Illinois, or whether the filings have simply continued to concentrate. Public reporting does not resolve that, and anyone advising on the question should pull the schedule of actions attached to the MDL 3194 motion rather than rely on any summary, this one included.

The Nevro petition never had that problem. It was brought by eight plaintiffs across a 17-action set and asks for the Central District of California and Judge Staton — a request that offers the Panel an efficiency it likes: a judge already fluent in the clinical and engineering vocabulary of neuromodulation, running a second SCS docket alongside the first. The Panel does not consolidate separate MDLs by assigning them to one judge, and the two dockets would remain formally distinct with separate leadership and separate discovery. But the overlap in judicial learning is real, and petitioners were right to lead with it.

The regulatory-history fork the intake pages skip

Behind the centralization question sits a preemption question that will do more to determine the value of these claims than any case count.

Spinal cord stimulators are implanted Class III devices. The premarket approval pathway for Class III devices carries the strongest preemption defense in medical device law: under Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., 552 U.S. 312 (2008), the Medical Device Amendments expressly preempt state-law claims that would impose requirements "different from, or in addition to" the federal requirements applicable to an approved device. What survives is the narrow category of parallel claims — allegations that the manufacturer violated a federal requirement in a way that also breaches a state-law duty — and claims about conduct outside the scope of the approval. Preemption (Products) is therefore not a peripheral defense in this litigation. It is the first thing every defendant will move on.

This is where the plaintiffs' framing in the Abbott cases becomes significant. The allegation reported across the Abbott filings is that the company built the Proclaim family and the Eterna platform on the foundation of a decades-old approval for a materially different predecessor system. Read as a pleading strategy, that is an attempt to characterize the newer devices as having reached the market on a regulatory basis that never evaluated them, which is the kind of allegation that can be pressed either as a parallel claim or as an argument that the approval does not cover the device as sold. Whether it works depends entirely on the actual regulatory pathway for each device generation, which varies by product and must be read from the approval documents rather than assumed.

The point for practitioners is structural. Centralization decides where the preemption fight happens and how many times it is fought. In a manufacturer-specific MDL it is briefed once, on a common record, and decided once — an outcome that is efficient and also binary. Spread across a dozen district courts, the same motion produces a dozen rulings, a slower litigation, and eventually a circuit split that gives both sides somewhere to go. Defendants opposing centralization are, among other things, choosing the second path, and they are choosing it in a posture where they currently believe the law favors them.

Where should a spinal cord stimulator case be filed right now?

There are three answers and they depend on the device, not on the injury.

Boston Scientific claims. File directly into MDL 3181 in the Central District of California under the direct-filing order. Direct filing is the efficient route, but it is not free of consequence: direct-filed cases arrive without a transferor forum, and the choice-of-law and remand mechanics for those cases are governed by the terms of the order and whatever Lexecon waiver, if any, the parties negotiate. Read the order before filing, and note that filing into the MDL means accepting the Common Benefit Fund assessment set by the court.

Abbott and Nevro claims. The Panel's decision is expected within roughly a week to ten days of the 24 September argument, which is the Panel's usual cadence. A claim with a pressing Statute of Limitations problem should be filed now in the proper district and tagged later if a docket is created; a claim with time on the clock may reasonably wait for the order, since the identity of the transferee court will shape pleading and venue choices. What a firm should not do is defer filing on the assumption that a petition will be granted. The February motion is a reminder that these petitions fail for reasons unrelated to the strength of the underlying claims.

Medtronic claims. There is no docket and no reported petition. These cases proceed individually, which means the case-specific work — product identification, implant and revision records, treating physician testimony, Specific Causation — has to be done by the filing firm rather than shared across a leadership structure. That is expensive, and it is the practical reason inventories in unconsolidated device litigation often sit unfiled.

What it means for plaintiffs' firms, defendants and funders

For plaintiffs' firms. The manufacturer-specific structure changes the economics of building an inventory. A mixed-brand book of spinal cord stimulator claims is not one litigation; it is up to four, each with its own discovery cost, its own leadership, its own common benefit assessment and its own timetable. Firms that have advertised the category generically will now find that the value of a claim depends heavily on which device was implanted, and that the Boston Scientific portion of the book is years ahead of the rest. The corollary is that the marginal value of an Abbott or Nevro claim rises sharply if the Panel grants centralization on 24 September, because a docket with leadership, a common discovery record and a Bellwether Trial track is a claim-liquefying structure that individually filed cases do not have.

For defendants. Opposing centralization has become the default posture in device litigation, and this category shows why it is not costless. Fragmentation defers a global reckoning, but it also means every early ruling — on preemption, on pleading sufficiency, on discovery scope — is made by a judge with no stake in the litigation as a whole and no reason to build a record that travels. Boston Scientific, having lost centralization, at least knows where its litigation lives and who is managing it. Abbott and Nevro, if they win on Thursday, will be managing a dispersed docket in which the first adverse preemption ruling anywhere becomes persuasive authority everywhere.

For funders and claim aggregators. Third-Party Litigation Funding models built on device categories rather than device brands are mispriced here. The duration risk differs by manufacturer by a matter of years, and the preemption risk is common across all four — which means diversification across brands buys far less protection than it appears to. A funder underwriting this category is taking one concentrated bet on Class III device preemption and three or four separate bets on timing.

For everyone. No spinal cord stimulator case has been tried to a verdict and no settlement program exists. Every per-claim figure currently circulating on the pages that rank for this litigation is a projection, not a data point. There is no Settlement Matrix because there is nothing yet to build one from.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a spinal cord stimulator MDL?

There is one: MDL No. 3181, covering Boston Scientific devices only, in the Central District of California before Judge Josephine L. Staton. Petitions for separate Abbott and Nevro dockets are pending and will be argued on 24 September 2026; Medtronic claims are in no MDL.

What happens at the JPML hearing on 24 September 2026?

The Panel hears oral argument in Chicago on the two manufacturer-specific petitions — MDL No. 3194 (Abbott) and MDL No. 3195 (Nevro) — along with the other matters on its September session calendar. Argument is short, counsel are allotted limited time, and the Panel does not rule from the bench; written orders typically follow within one to two weeks.

Are Medtronic spinal cord stimulator lawsuits part of an MDL?

No. Medtronic claims were excluded from the June 2026 order along with Abbott and Nevro, and no petition to centralize them has been reported. They proceed individually in the districts where they are filed.

How many spinal cord stimulator lawsuits are pending?

MDL 3181 held 29 actions on the September 2026 pending-MDL report. The Nevro petition covers 17 actions and roughly two dozen Abbott claims have been reported nationwide. Those are federal filed cases; they are not a measure of the potential claimant population, and they sit several orders of magnitude below the more than 80,000 device injury reports the FDA received between 2008 and 2018.

Have there been any spinal cord stimulator settlements or verdicts?

None. No case in any of these dockets has reached a jury and no manufacturer has announced a settlement program. Figures presented elsewhere as expected settlement values are estimates produced before any verdict exists, and they should be treated accordingly.

Why does it matter which manufacturer made the device?

Because centralization, and therefore the pace and structure of the litigation, is being decided manufacturer by manufacturer. The device brand determines whether a claim enters an organized proceeding with leadership and a common discovery record, or a single district court where the filing firm bears the full cost of developing the case.