The term “kitchen sink complaint” is not meant as a compliment. And the court did not use it as one in describing the proposed amended complaint in Ehlers v. Abiomed, Inc., — F. Supp. 3d –, 2025 WL 2029662, *9 (E.D. Mo. Jul. 21, 2025). The term refers to the tendency of some attorneys to cram every conceivable legal theory, tangential grievance, and hypothetical harm into one massive, often incoherent document. Rather than focusing on the specific facts and legal merits of a claim, these complaints drown the court in allegations, regardless of relevance or plausibility. That is not advocacy. It’s legal bloat. Or strategic spaghetti throwing—hurl enough theories at the court and see what sticks. Sheer tenacity aside, length is not a substitute for substance. So, when a complaint is packed with more filler than a gas station hot dog, we know the game: overwhelm the defendant, survive a motion to dismiss by burying the court in verbiage, and keep the case alive long enough to force a settlement. Fortunately, plaintiff’s kitchen sink approach in Ehlers accomplished none of those objectives.

Ehlers involved a Class III, Pre-Market Approved medical device used during plaintiff’s mother’s surgery to replace her mitral valve. Plaintiff alleges that the lead on the device did not release after surgery causing her mother to experience intravascular hemolysis which led to her death. Id. at *1. Defendant argued that all of plaintiff’s claims were preempted. The decision contains a nice summary of PMA preemption law generally and how it has developed in the Eighth Circuit. Id. at *4-7.

The original complaint in Ehlers was two-and-a-half pages long and contained two causes of action. While defendant’s motion to dismiss that complaint was pending, plaintiff filed a motion for leave to amend attaching a 50-page proposed amended complaint with over two hundred allegations and four causes of action (negligence, strict liability, breach of express warranty, and breach of implied warranty). Id. *1-2. In turn demonstrating perhaps the most damning feature of a kitchen sink complaint—that they are a cover for weak cases. When a lawyer has a strong, clear claim it doesn’t require 200 paragraphs to explain. But when the facts are thin, and causation is murky, that’s when you see the kitchen sink come out. It’s not “a short and plain statement of the claim.” It’s camouflage. But don’t take our word for it. Here’s how the court described the kitchen sink complaint in Ehlers:

[M]any of the exceptionally technical allegations in the complaint bear no relevance to [plaintiff]’s claims or theories for relief—they instead look more like an attempt to obfuscate the issues, paint [defendant] in an unsympathetic light by pointing to red herrings, and proffer as many legal theories as possible, likely in the hope that at least one claim would survive the pleading stage.

Id. at *9.

Going back to the original complaint, it suffered the opposite problem. There was no “there” anywhere.  The complaint alleged a manufacturing defect claim but only stated that the lead did not release. It did not allege either how the device was defective or how the alleged manufacturing defect violated the FDA’s PMA requirements. Plaintiff failed to include any allegations of how her state law claim paralleled federal requirements so as to avoid PMA preemption. Plaintiff tried to fix that problem in her response brief by including a list of alleged violations. But as that list was not in the complaint, nor did the complaint contain any factual allegations to support the alleged violations, the court held plaintiff’s conclusory arguments were “at best nothing more than an attempt to amend her complaint by brief.” Id. at *8. Which the court rejected. Plaintiff’s only other claim, breach of implied warranty, would require her to convince the jury that the device was not safe and effective, “a finding that would be contrary to the FDA’s approval,” and therefore preempted.  Id.

After granting defendant’s motion to dismiss, the court turned its attention to plaintiff’s motion to amend and defendant’s argument that the proposed amendment would be futile. Because the complaint was so “broad” and “disorganized,” and because “it is the alleged factual matter that make or breaks a complaint at the pleadings stage,” the court’s analysis went allegation-by-allegation to determine whether it stated any non-preempted claim. Spoiler alert—it didn’t. We’ll spare you the allegation-by-allegation re-play and hit the highlights instead.

Every time the allegations focused on an alleged failure to warn, plaintiff failed to include any allegations about hemolysis, the actual injury at issue. Moreover, because the allegedly missing warnings went beyond those that were FDA-approved, any claim premised on them was preempted.  Id. at *10.  Also, the only “example” of misleading information the plaintiff included was a link to the defendant’s website for the medical device. The court took this as an invitation to visit the website, where it found an explicit warning of the very adverse event plaintiff’s mother allegedly suffered, as well as numerous other warnings. Id. at *14-15.

While plaintiff spent dozens of paragraphs explaining how the medical device can cause hemolysis, nowhere in the over 200 paragraphs did plaintiff alleged that the medical device caused plaintiff’s mother’s hemolysis “because of any defect in the device.” Id. at *11. At best, the complaint raises concerns about an inherent risk of the device—making it an “attack[] on the risk/benefit analysis that led the FDA to approve an inherently dangerous Class III device,” which is expressly preempted. Id.

The opinion goes on like this cataloging all the flaws in the hundreds of allegations in the amended complaint, including many about risks and procedures completely unrelated to the surgery or alleged injury at issue.  All of which led the court to conclude that even with the addition of 48 new pages, plaintiff’s claims would not survive a renewed motion to dismiss.  Id. at *15.      

Complaints like this turn judges are not garbage sorters, tasked with parsing through a landfill of vague and unsupported allegations to find a pearl of plausibility, or not. Ehlers is proof that the kitchen sink complaint is a crutch for weak lawyering. If a plaintiff’s case has merit, it can stand on its own. If it doesn’t, no amount of padding will save it.

Congratulations to Bart Sullivan of Fox Smith and  J.T. Larson & Erin Pauley of Barnes & Thornburg for the win and thanks for bringing it to our attention.