Kelsey Stokes

In May 2017, Antonio Milanesi went into surgery for what appeared to be a hernia that had come back. His surgeon, Dr. Michael Caluda, found an abscess, an infection, and a fistula between Milanesi’s small bowel and the hernia mesh that had been inside him for ten years. Caluda recorded that “[a] loop of the small bowel was densely adherent to the overlying mesh.” The patch was “distorted,” “firm,” and “not pliable,” bent into what he described as a “buckling” shape. Surgeons removed it, resected the damaged section of bowel, and repaired the hernia a second time. A high-grade small bowel obstruction followed, and Milanesi went back into emergency surgery.

The mesh was a Bard Ventralex Hernia Patch. Dr. Karanbir Gill had implanted it in July 2007 to close an umbilical hernia about two centimeters across, choosing the large size because closing the defect with stitches alone would have put the tissue under “undue tension.” The Ventralex is a coin-sized round patch built in layers: polypropylene mesh on the side facing the abdominal wall, where tissue is meant to grow into it, and a sheet of expanded PTFE on the side facing the intestines, designed to keep tissue from attaching, with a memory coil ring set between the polypropylene layers. Bard described a patch that would “pop open and lay flat.” For a decade it did its job. By 2017 the Ventralex had curled, exposed its bare polypropylene side to the intestine, adhered to it, and eroded through.

The Milanesis traced the failure to the device’s materials. Polypropylene degrades inside the body, they contended; the PTFE layer contracts faster than the polypropylene around it; and a weak ring lets the patch “potato chip,” turning bare polypropylene toward the bowel. Judge Edmund A. Sargus, Jr. noted that the shape had a geometric name, a hyperbolic paraboloid. Milanesi’s suit was one of the cases consolidated before him in Columbus in 2018 as In re: Davol, Inc./C.R. Bard, Inc., Polypropylene Hernia Mesh Products Liability Litigation, and it became the second bellwether tried there. Kelsey Stokes co-leads the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee that built the case, as Plaintiffs’ Co-Lead Counsel over the consolidated docket.

What Dr. Gill Expected

Trial opened in Columbus on March 21, 2022, and ran about four weeks. Jeff Grand of Seeger Weiss represented Milanesi and his wife, Alicia Morz de Milanesi, at trial. Florida law governed. Bard’s position was that a complex medical device could be judged defective only by weighing its risks against its benefits. At summary judgment the previous October, Judge Sargus had held that the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in Aubin did not require that test, and that the Milanesis could ask the jury whether the Ventralex had performed as safely as an ordinary consumer would expect. Instruction No. 18 told the jury whose expectations to measure: those of Dr. Gill, the surgeon who chose the patch.

Dr. Jimmy Mays, a polymer biomaterials scientist, explained why the mesh had failed that way: the body’s response to implanted polypropylene stiffens and hardens the material over time, and as it shrinks, a curled edge can expose bare mesh to whatever organ lies beneath it. Dr. David Krpata, called as an expert on the surgery itself, testified that the curled, exposed Ventralex had caused both the fistula and the infection, ruling out other explanations by working through Milanesi’s medical history and the details of the original implant. If a different device had been used, Krpata testified, Milanesi “could have had a different outcome.”

Bard’s defense was that Milanesi had suffered a risk that comes with placing any mesh inside the abdomen. Krpata acknowledged that no device is free of risk and that he had no study showing higher complication rates for the Ventralex. Judge Sargus held that the acknowledgment did not defeat Krpata’s opinion that this device’s defect caused this patient’s injury, and that Mays’s testimony on degradation, combined with Krpata’s causation opinions, was legally sufficient.

On April 15, 2022, applying Florida law, the jury found Bard’s Ventralex negligently designed and awarded Milanesi $250,000, with $5,000 more to Alicia Morz de Milanesi for loss of consortium. It rejected the Milanesis’ claims for strict liability, failure to warn, and misrepresentation, and found no punitive damages. The jury’s $255,000 stood: Bard’s motion for judgment as a matter of law failed, and so did the Milanesis’ motion for more.

Twenty Thousand Cases, One Failure Mode

The Davol/Bard hernia mesh litigation opened in the fall of 2018, when the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the first wave of implant-failure suits to Columbus, and Judge Sargus appointed the plaintiffs’ leadership that September. Stokes holds the Co-Lead Counsel seat opposite Timothy M. O’Brien of the Levin Papantonio firm, atop a Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee drawn from more than a dozen firms, with David Butler of Taft Stettinius & Hollister serving as liaison counsel. By early 2024 the consolidated docket held nearly 21,000 direct-filed cases over twenty-two Bard devices. By the time Bard and the steering committee reached a settlement that October, more than 25,000 product-liability suits had been filed against the company since the litigation opened.

That docket held cases against a range of Bard mesh products, tied together by one recurring failure. Milanesi’s Ventralex had curled inside him. As the bellwether trials went on, the same defect would recur in a different Bard mesh, implanted for a different hernia, in a different patient’s body. Stokes has described the litigation in those terms. Polypropylene was a problem across the docket, she said in an interview before the Milanesi trial, but “you need to know the devices and you need to know the mechanism of failure for each device.” For Bard’s ST products, which carry a resorbable barrier, she said that “the barrier goes away way too quickly, way before the body can heal itself and essentially create its own natural barrier.” For the plugs used in groin repairs, she described hardened, contracted mesh squeezing the nerves. “I’ve had clients say that they feel like they have a cigarette pack in their groin,” she said.

Forty Expert Reports

Stokes came to hernia mesh from the transvaginal mesh cases. She earned a B.A. and a B.S. at the University of Texas at Austin and a J.D. at the University of Houston Law Center. After a summer as an associate at a defense firm, she interviewed with the Houston firm Fleming, Nolen & Jez while still in law school. “And so I started as a law clerk here and they hired me on,” she said. In the Ethicon transvaginal mesh litigation, forty bellwether cases were selected, and Stokes “worked with the experts and got expert reports for all 40 of those cases.” She also managed the firm’s GranuFlo docket from filing to resolution without a seat in that litigation’s leadership.

In October 2018, a month after the Columbus appointments, Judge John C. Porto of the New Jersey Superior Court in Atlantic County named Stokes to the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the consolidated Physiomesh litigation against Ethicon. Stokes led a parallel track outside the federal court, too: three consolidated hernia mesh proceedings in New Jersey state court over Ethicon’s Physiomesh, Proceed Mesh, and Prolene Hernia System devices—a different manufacturer, the same underlying claim that a mesh implant had failed to do safely what it had been implanted to do. She has co-chaired the American Association for Justice’s Hernia Mesh Litigation Group for more than seven years.

Aaron Stinson’s PerFix Plug

Aaron Stinson, a Maine man, was hurt while working on a sailboat. In August 2015 his surgeon, Dr. Tan, repaired a right inguinal hernia with an extra-large Bard PerFix Plug—a cone of mesh threaded into the hernia defect, a different design from Milanesi’s flat Ventralex patch, implanted eight years after it. By 2017 Stinson was living with constant leg and groin pain. Dr. Radke operated to look for a recurrent hernia or a trapped nerve and found extensive scarring and “a large ball approximately 2.5 cm in diameter of rolled up mesh next to the pubic tubercle.” The plug had curled into a ball of scar tissue. Radke called the removal “slow going and extremely difficult,” and he repaired the hernia with another Bard mesh.

Nerve injections brought no lasting relief. On May 10, 2023, five months before his trial, surgeons removed the second Bard mesh, and Stinson lost his right testicle and spermatic cord.

The steering committee’s third bellwether trial opened before Judge Sargus on October 16, 2023, with Stokes and O’Brien among Stinson’s lawyers and Jeff Grand of Seeger Weiss again on the trial team. Stinson’s case turned on what Bard told surgeons. He contended that Bard knew the PerFix Plug carried particular risks and downplayed the rate and severity of its complications. Dr. Tan testified that she would have expected the instructions for use to warn of “any increased risk specific to the PerFix Plug of chronic pain, mesh contraction, and increased fibrotic reaction,” and that if she had known of any increased risk, “it would have affected her decisions” about his treatment.

Bard relied on the learned-intermediary rule, under which a manufacturer’s duty runs to the doctor. Dr. Tan, Bard argued, had warned Stinson of pain and nerve damage and was “fully aware of the risk of fibrosis, inflammation and long-term pain,” and an American College of Surgeons brochure warned patients of “continued pain.” At summary judgment, Judge Sargus had found a factual dispute over whether Tan knew of the risks specific to the PerFix Plug, and that question went to the jury.

The jury heard that Bard had known of the risk of PerFix Plug failures before Stinson’s mesh went in and had not warned him or his doctors. On November 8, 2023, it found Bard liable for negligence, negligent failure to warn, and strict liability for failure to warn, and awarded Stinson $500,000 in compensatory damages, again with no punitive award—the same restraint the Milanesi jury had shown a year and a half earlier. Bard had moved for judgment before the verdict and moved again after it. On January 31, 2024, Judge Sargus denied both motions, writing that Bard had “not presented a compelling reason for the Court to depart from its prior ruling.” Both juries reached the same conclusion from different evidence: a Bard mesh, implanted to repair a hernia, had curled inside the body and injured the person it was meant to protect.

From Three Trials to One Settlement

A fourth bellwether trial, over a Bard 3D Max mesh, was scheduled for April 8, 2024. Judge Sargus vacated it on February 1. Three trials, he wrote, had already given both sides what they needed to know to negotiate, and another long, expensive trial was unlikely to teach them much more. He had spent fifty-six days in trial on the litigation by then, and the parties had been negotiating with a court-appointed settlement master since August 2022. He wrote that “the goal in this case is to reach a global settlement,” and he ordered Bard and the steering committee into three to four months of settlement talks before he would consider sending any more cases home for individual trial.

Stokes had named the same goal before Milanesi went to trial. “So it is absolutely 100% our goal to resolve these globally and that’s what we’re trying to do,” she said. She also stated the condition: “if we have to keep trying cases, then we’re going to do that,” rather than resolve them for less than a fair value.

The talks succeeded. On October 2, 2024, Bard’s parent company, Becton, Dickinson and Company, announced an agreement resolving the vast majority of its hernia litigation, in the federal cases in Columbus and the consolidated cases in Rhode Island, which together involved about 38,000 claims. Bard and the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee had reached a global settlement expected to resolve tens of thousands of hernia mesh claims—the resolution that three bellwether trials, and the evidence Stokes’s committee had built inside each of them, had been aimed at from the start. Stokes was the plaintiffs’ lead settlement counsel. The terms were confidential, Becton Dickinson admitted no liability, and the company said the payments would be made over several years.

New suits kept arriving after the announcement—at least thirty in the following six months—and Judge Sargus set out what each late claimant would have to show: sworn certification that the claim was timely, early discovery, and a case-specific expert report connecting the claimant’s mesh to the claimant’s injury.

What the Settlement Pays

Work on paying the settlement had begun before the deal was announced. Judge Sargus had appointed the mediator John Jackson as settlement master back in August 2022, two years before the global deal, to work the case toward resolution alongside the parties as the bellwether trials proceeded. In November 2024, a month after the announcement, the court appointed a second special master, Ellen K. Reisman, and set up what it called an Intensive Settlement Process for claimants who had opted out of the deal, whose case substitutions had been rejected, or who simply had not yet settled: monthly two-day sessions, in person, with counsel and claimants required to appear with full settlement authority, and a formal mediation before the chosen special master if an informal conference failed to resolve the claim. Bard and the plaintiffs would split the cost of that process evenly. Once a claim settled and its liens were resolved under that process, payment was due within thirty days.

A qualified settlement fund, to hold the money as claims resolved, followed that December. On December 16, 2024, by agreement of the plaintiffs’ lead counsel and Bard, Judge Sargus established the 2024 Bard HM Global Qualified Settlement Fund. Peter Haugh became its administrator, with custody of the money and authority to pay it out on proper instructions. Wells Fargo Bank became escrow agent. Archer Systems became the exclusive lien administrator, verifying and resolving what Medicare and Medicaid were owed from each recovery. The fund pays individual amounts to eligible settling claimants, including through structured settlements. The order named Kelsey L. Stokes as Administering Counsel for the federal cases and Jonathen D. Orent for the Rhode Island proceeding.

A Title That Moved With Her

On February 23, 2026, Judge Sargus signed an order that had nothing to do with mesh, verdicts, or settlement funds. It updated Kelsey Stokes’s contact information. She had changed law firms, and the order amended a paragraph of the June 2019 order that had already listed her as Plaintiffs’ Co-Lead Counsel, carrying the appointment over to her new address at The Lanier Law Firm in Houston. The title had outlasted the firm.

The work that title carries is administrative now as much as adversarial: overseeing how a settlement reaches tens of thousands of claimants rather than preparing a fourth trial. That summer, Stokes tried a hernia mesh case in Boston.

Symbotex in Boston

When the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the federal cases over Covidien’s hernia mesh to Judge Patti B. Saris in Boston in June 2022, Stokes and O’Brien became co-leads of the plaintiffs’ committee there as well. Much of the Covidien litigation concerned polyester mesh, and Stokes went after the material. In state court in Massachusetts the Covidien claims had centered on multifilament polyester; Stokes was also pursuing monofilament cases, which by her count made up about half of her clients’ Covidien claims. “Whether multifilament or monofilament, polyester is not biocompatible,” she said. “Polyester is not only highly inflammatory but also weak, which defeats the purpose of using it in the first place.”

The first case tried was Larry Patterson’s. On July 26, 2017, he went to an Alabama emergency department with a bulging hernia, and the next day Dr. Lucian Newman III repaired it laparoscopically with Covidien’s Symbotex, a polyester mesh coated with a film of porcine collagen and glycerol meant to keep the bowel from sticking to it while the abdomen healed. The instructions for use said the film was “essentially degraded in less than 1 month.” Covidien’s materials said the barrier “remained intact after 7 days” in animal studies. Newman said he believed the barrier lasted up to thirty days. He relied on Covidien’s sales representatives, and no one from the company told him it could be resorbed within seven days.

In 2004 Covidien had switched the collagen on the predicate mesh from bovine to porcine, and its own rat study found the porcine film fully resorbed at seven days, while the bovine film had only begun to resorb. Covidien’s chief scientist said the barrier was “not functioning” after about a week. At trial, the Pattersons pointed to company testimony that the barrier begins to break down within hours and is essentially gone in about seven days, and to sales representatives trained to describe protection lasting up to thirty days.

On July 1, 2020, Patterson went back to the emergency department with sharp, burning abdominal pain and nausea. He had a small bowel obstruction and an incarcerated hernia. Newman operated the next day and found the “bowel stuck and obstructed at level of old repair.” He removed the mesh and a three-inch segment of intestine that had adhered to it.

Covidien moved for summary judgment, arguing among other things that Newman’s own knowledge, and his failure to read the instructions, broke the chain of causation. Alabama law governed. On June 2, 2026, Judge Saris denied the motion on the failure-to-warn claims, holding that a jury could find the warnings inadequate and that proximate cause was a question for the jury, because Newman had said he did not know the barrier could resorb within seven days.

Trial opened in mid-July 2026 and ran about three weeks. O’Brien led the trial team, and Stokes handled key witnesses and tried the case with him. Alex Taylor and Caleb Cunningham of Levin Papantonio had developed the testimony of Patterson’s implanting surgeon, who appeared as a neutral witness and supported the failure-to-warn claims. Larry Patterson, then sixty-one, and his wife, Tammy, each testified about what the previous six years had taken from their lives. On August 4, 2026, the jury unanimously found that Covidien had failed to warn physicians of the mesh’s risks and awarded $77 million to Larry Patterson and $11 million to Tammy Patterson on her consortium claim, all compensatory, with no punitive damages. Patterson’s was the first of more than 2,400 cases in the Covidien MDL to reach a jury. Medtronic, which owns Covidien, said it would challenge the verdict in post-trial motions before Judge Saris and, if necessary, on appeal.

Olympus and the Cleaning Instructions

Stokes has also taken up a docket that looks like the hernia mesh litigation did at its start. Since 2025, she and her colleague David Hobbs have represented patients who allege that Olympus’s reusable endoscopes and duodenoscopes cannot be fully cleaned between patients no matter how closely hospitals follow the manufacturer’s own instructions, leaving bacterial contamination—including drug-resistant infections—on a scope built to go inside the next patient. Stokes put the claim plainly: “what we have discovered is that by the design of this device, it is impossible, impossible to clean.” Even when hospital staff “follow the instructions to a T, these devices are still not clean,” she said.

In November 2022 the FDA sent a warning letter to Aizu Olympus, a subsidiary that makes Olympus devices, citing failures to validate product designs and to set written procedures for reporting adverse events. The FDA blocked 58 Olympus products made in Japan from import in June 2025; the company issued a voluntary recall of an endoscope accessory that January over the same risk. No settlement master has been appointed yet, and no bellwether trial has been scheduled. The Olympus docket is roughly where the Bard hernia mesh docket stood in 2018—before anyone had tried a case, before anyone knew how many claims it would eventually hold, before there was a title to carry from one firm to the next.