This week we could not resist writing about a good result from an always interesting jurisdiction (Louisiana) involving one of our all-time favorite defense lawyers (Hi, Lori Cohen). 

In McGuire v. B. Braun Med. Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 184172, 2025 WL 2689205 (E.D. Louisiana Sept. 19, 2025), the district court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss an IVC complaint on several TwIqbal grounds. Laissez les bon temps rouler!

The claim in McGuire will sound familiar to most of you. IVC devices are designed to trap and filter blood clots before they travel to the heart and lungs. The plaintiffs claimed that sometime after implantation of the device it failed “when it tilted, penetrated, perforated, and fractured” inside the plaintiff, causing him injuries. He and his wife filed a complaint that alleged two causes of action: one asserted a couple of theories under the Louisiana Products Liability Act (the LPLA – one of our favorite things from the Pelican State, just after etouffee and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), and one under “redhibitory defect” (we like that rather less – sort of like how we feel about the New Orleans Saints and Huey Long). The plaintiffs ended up withdrawing their redhibitory claim. Bless their hearts for that. 

The first ground for dismissal was that the plaintiffs’ boilerplate allegation of injury was insufficient.  The complaint lacked “allegations regarding actual concrete harm,” did not claim that the device failed in its intended purpose, or that it caused any particular medical treatment, alleged no “specific pain or impairment of bodily function,” no pain in relevant body parts, or even what led to the medical test that revealed the alleged malfunction.   There is no reason for the plaintiffs not to know all these facts: “This information is within plaintiffs’ own knowledge or control, and plaintiffs should be able to articulate the nature of any injury, if one exists. As it stands, plaintiffs have failed to plead an actual injury.”

To establish a claim for “defective construction or composition” under the LPLA, plaintiffs must establish that “at the time the product left it’s manufacturer’s control, the product deviated in a material way from the manufacturer’s specifications or performance standards for the product or from otherwise identical products manufactured by the same manufacturer.” The McGuire court held that the defect allegations were conclusory and circular.  Those allegations essentially amounted to saying that the bad result showed a construction defect.  That is not good enough.  Moreover, the plaintiffs did “not allege how the unidentified defect caused plaintiffs’ alleged injuries.”  

The design claim was also, er, defective. It did not identify any particular “safety feature” that the product lacked and did not allege how the device failed. Should the device have been made out of different materials or deployed a different mechanism.  Who knows?  The plaintiffs didn’t seem to, and that consigned the design claim to oblivion. 

Now we get to the claim of failure to warn. Louisiana applies the learned intermediary doctrine, and that is bad news for the McGuire plaintiffs. Their warning claim failed to allege what different thing the surgeon would have done (such as decided against implanting the IVC) had he received what the plaintiffs asserted would have been an adequate warning (e.g., that the device could migrate, collapse, fracture, etc.).  The complete failure to allege warning causation doomed the warning claim.   

And as is almost always the case, the plaintiffs’ express warranty claim did not state the actual language of the purported warranty, nor was any fact supporting reliance pleaded.  Merely saying that the plaintiffs would not have purchased the device if they had known it was “faulty” did not cut the mustard (or remoulade).  And so, to use a term that is both French and always our first Wordle guess, the court bid “adieu” to the complaint.  (But since the court granted the plaintiffs’ motion to amend, maybe “au revoir” would be more accurate.)

The McGuire case has been added to the DDL Blog’s TwIqbal cheat sheet.