Check Out Our New Forum!
The Your Turn Forum provides a space where people can post questions about mesh and medical device related issues and get advice and support from the Mesh News Desk community.
Join the Discussion!
Mesh Medical Device News Desk, April 23, 2018 ~ You will have to open a PACER account to find your case filed in the Southern District of West Virginia. Here's how.
How to get a Pacer Account
Mesh News Desk gets many requests from plaintiffs about their lawsuit.
Those filed in federal court are accessible to the public if they have a PACER account.
Pacer stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records (here). Pacer will allow you to look up all US district, bankruptcy and appellate court cases.
Bryd federal courthouse, Charleston, WV
You can look up your case filed in federal court in Charleston, West Virginia if you obtain a pacer account and if you have your case number. It should appear on any correspondence you have received from your law firm. If you do not have a case number, insist your lawyer provide one!
The multidistrict litigation (MDL) is gathered in the Southern District of West Virginia, one of two federal court jurisdictions in that state. There are currently in excess of 104,000 cases filed there against seven mesh makers.
Mesh Awareness Movement in Charleston, WV, June 2015
Go to Pacer.gov. (here) Hit Register on the toolbar. Hit Start, View, Continue.
* Fill out the registration form online.
You will have to select a username and password and answer some Security Questions.
*New Add* THIS IS IMPORTANT - it will ask for a credit card. Pacer charges 10 cents a page to search and access a document. If you enter the credit card (I've never had a problem) you can begin searching right away. If NOT - you have to wait 7 to 10 days to become an authorized user and they will send you something by mail.
* Once you successfully log into PACER you can pull up the district courts around the country and the US Supreme Court.
Click on the Southern District of WV to find cases filed in the MDL. Log into So District. Hit Query on top left side Enter your case number and hit Run Query tab on the lower left.
Want to find out whats happening in your particular mesh manufacturers, put in the MDL number - ie for J&J it's 02327 so it should look like this, Hit Run, Query, then hit History.
* Hit Run, Query again. In the case of J&J, every document filed in the case since 2012 will be listed up to Documents #5,672 which is today. You will pay about 10 cents a page to look at these so look at Motions.
Judge orders are available on the So District of WV page (https://www.wvsd.uscourts.gov/) for free so you will not want to pay for them via Pacer.
Good luck! ###
