3M and a Chubb unit have settled a legal dispute regarding insurance coverage for thousands of lawsuits linked to a post-surgical warming device.
A Minnesota federal court on Monday dismissed Federal Insurance Co. v 3M Co. on Monday, citing a confidential settlement. The 3M Bair Hugger forced-air warming blanket is designed to maintain a patient’s body temperature during surgery. Litigants claimed the device causes bacterial infections.
Federal Insurance claimed in a 2021 lawsuit suit that each surgery counted as a separate occurrence in the policy, requiring a separate per-occurrence deductible for each patient. In November 2022, the U.S. District court in Minneapolis ruled that only a single occurrence could be applied to the design and manufacturing of the devices, therefore only one deductible needed to be paid.
The court sided with Federal, however, in saying that it only had to pay defense costs associated with cases covered by the policies it issued, not the full cost of the multidistrict litigation defense.
3M and the insurer had agreed to stall the proceedings pending resolution of litigation.
There are 8,411 Bair Hugger cases pending in in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota as of July 1, making it the country’s sixth–largest multidistrict litigation, according to an official tracker maintained by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. The docket was originally formed in 2015, and no global settlement has been reached.
The Bair Hugger device is still widely used. Maker Solventum, a 3M spinoff, says studies have found it safe and effective.