Cook LLC Settlement: IVC Filter Cases in the U.S. and Canada

Cook Medical and plaintiffs’ attorneys reached agreement on the major terms of a Cook IVC filter settlement for a portion of the federal multidistrict litigation in October 2025, but the deal does not cover the entire docket, no dollar figures have been made public, and negotiations are continuing firm-by-firm across roughly 6,562 cases that remain pending as of May 2026.¹²

Where the U.S. Settlement Stands

The litigation is consolidated as MDL 2570 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, before Senior Judge Richard L. Young, with Magistrate Judge Tim A. Baker handling settlement matters. For most of the MDL’s life, Cook resisted any global deal. That posture began changing in early 2025, when the court held status conferences in March and April and ordered both sides to categorize the pending cases by injury type and submit competing valuations for each category.¹

By October 2025, court filings confirmed the parties had “reached agreement on the major terms and conditions of settlement” for a group of active cases. The agreement did not extend to the whole MDL, and neither the total value nor the per-case structure has been disclosed publicly. Since January 2025, about 1,018 cases have been resolved through settlements and other dispositions.²

Talks are proceeding on a firm-by-firm basis rather than as one master deal. In late November 2025, Judge Baker scheduled four settlement conferences for January 2026, each targeting the inventory of a specific plaintiffs’ firm.³ Those conferences continue through mid-2026, and no comprehensive resolution has been announced.

How Cases Are Being Valued

Judge Young has required plaintiffs to submit “Claim Categorization Forms” that sort each injury into one of seven tiers. The tiers run from cases where the filter remains implanted without acute complications, described in the court’s framework as “product-in-place,” up through wrongful death claims. Cases involving open surgery, which requires cutting into the chest or abdomen and leaves scarring, are expected to receive the highest settlement values.⁴

Every plaintiff must also certify that their damages exceed $75,000. That requirement follows directly from a June 2023 Seventh Circuit decision, Parton v. Cook Medical, LLC, involving two plaintiffs whose filters had perforated their vein walls but who had no symptoms. The appeals court held it was “legally certain” their damages could not reach the $75,000 federal jurisdictional threshold, vacated summary judgment for Cook, and ordered the cases dismissed without prejudice.⁵⁶ The ruling established that within an MDL, each plaintiff must independently show their case meets the federal court’s jurisdictional minimum. Generic allegations from the master complaint are not enough if they do not match the individual’s actual injury.

The categories in dispute reflect the injuries plaintiffs have alleged throughout the litigation: fracture, where the device breaks and sends metal fragments into the bloodstream; migration, where the filter moves out of position; perforation, where the struts puncture the vein wall or surrounding organs; and tilting. A 2012 study in Cardiovascular Interventional Radiology reported that 100% of Cook Celect and Günther Tulip filters perforated the vena cava wall within 71 days of implantation, and 40% became tilted.⁷

Why Cook Is Talking Settlement Now

Cook Medical, unlike its main competitor C.R. Bard, chose to fight rather than reach an early global settlement. The bellwether results were mixed. The first bellwether, Hill v. Cook Medical, ended in November 2017 with a defense verdict after the court granted summary judgment on the failure-to-warn claim and the jury found no product defect. The second bellwether, Gage v. Cook, also went to Cook on summary judgment.

Plaintiffs then won two in a row. In May 2018, a Texas jury awarded former firefighter Jeff Pavlok $1.2 million, finding Cook failed to warn about the Celect filter’s risks after it damaged his aorta and small intestine.¹²

After that, most bellwethers ended before trial. Cook won summary judgment in McDermitt in March 2020. The fifth through eighth bellwethers were dismissed by the plaintiffs themselves. In November 2023, the court granted summary judgment for Cook in Scott v. Cook, citing a lack of expert evidence supporting the design-defect claim.⁸

The earlier bellwethers focused on the Celect. Judge Young has now moved to the Günther Tulip, Cook’s first IVC filter. In June 2025 the court set a schedule for selecting representative Tulip cases. The parties submitted a joint list of 376 eligible claims in October 2025. Judge Young excluded cases involving deceased plaintiffs as unrepresentative, and under the current plan plaintiffs, defendants, and the court will each pick eight cases from the remaining pool, producing 24 bellwether candidates.⁹ No Günther Tulip case has yet been tried. The prospect of that new round of trials is one of the pressures driving the current settlement talks.

The Canadian Class Action Settlement Is Closed

A separate class action in Canada, Kuiper et al. v. Cook (Canada) Inc. et al., settled on different terms. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice approved the settlement on May 17, 2024, covering Canadian residents implanted with a Günther Tulip, Cook Celect, or Cook Celect Platinum filter on or before January 8, 2020.¹⁰

The Canadian settlement was claims-made, with per-claim maximums keyed to injury type:

Qualifying fracture: up to $54,000 CAD
Qualifying death: up to $81,000 CAD
Qualifying open surgery: up to $169,500 CAD

Those amounts were subject to proportional reduction if the total across those categories exceeded $4,062,720 CAD. A separate $2,708,480 CAD covered administration, legal fees, and other expenses.¹¹ Claimants whose complications fell short of fracture, death, or open surgery could still recover under a point-based system, with points from 1 to 12 depending on the severity of the event.¹²

The claim deadline was November 11, 2024. The Canadian settlement is concluded and no further claims are being accepted.¹⁰ The Canadian figures do not set values for U.S. cases; the U.S. MDL is being negotiated separately under its own seven-tier framework.

What Happens If Talks Stall

The U.S. litigation is in a transitional stretch. Cook has shifted from pure adversarial trial strategy to negotiated resolution for at least part of the docket, but thousands of cases remain unresolved between the federal MDL and a smaller inventory in Indiana state court. If the firm-by-firm settlement conferences do not produce broader agreement, and if the Günther Tulip bellwether trials do not generate enough pressure to force one, Judge Young has said he intends to remand cases to federal district courts around the country for individual trials in the plaintiffs’ home jurisdictions.⁹¹

1
Drugwatch. IVC Filter Lawsuits
2
MDL Update. MDL 2570 Cook Medical Inc IVC Filters
3
HarrisMartin. Settlement Conferences Scheduled in Cook Medical IVC Filter MDL
4
Rheingold Law. Cook IVC Filter Lawsuits
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Justia. Parton v. Cook Medical LLC, No. 22-2256
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The Indiana Lawyer. 7th Circuit Vacates Summary Judgment for Cook Medical in IVC Filter Cases
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Shezad Malik Law Firm. Cook IVC Filter MDL Litigation Centralized in Southern Indiana
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ConsumerNotice.org. IVC Filter Lawsuits
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AboutLawsuits.com. Cook Tulip Filter Fractured Perforated Inferior Vena Cava
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McKenzie Lake Lawyers. IVC Filters Class Action
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Koskie Minsky LLP. Cook IVC Filter Settlement Hearing Notice
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McKenzie Lake Lawyers. Cook Compensation Protocol