Word: medicament
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...March, Sulzer Medica executives flew Scruggs to their headquarters in Winterthur, Switzerland. "Does everybody know what the IRS is?" Scruggs drawled before the stone-faced suits. "Well, I feel like an IRS agent who says he's here to help." He didn't get so much as a grin...
...Medica faced internal conflicts before it could evaluate legal advice. Some executives in Winterthur blamed their counterparts in Austin, Texas, where the joints were made, and the Austin executives looked to headquarters for direction. Says CEO Stephan Rietiker: "My first task was to bring people together and create team spirit...
...Sulzer Medica was one of those quietly successful Swiss firms that make steady money and precision products--in its case, medical implants from teeth to knees. But then Medica burst into the news in the worst way. In December it recalled 40,000 titanium hip replacements that had been tainted during manufacture with a thin film of oil--just enough to prevent some patients' bones from bonding to them. The recall forced more than 2,500 to endure a second painful operation to replace faulty implanted joints; 2,000 more are expected. Most are in the U.S., so of course...
...February, with Sulzer Medica facing possible bankruptcy, one of its U.S. executives rang his buddy Joe Cunningham, a physician prominent in Texas, to brainstorm. "My basic idea," Cunningham says, "was to get somebody who thinks like a plaintiff and see how they would respond to this." He called Richard Scruggs, the Pascagoula, Miss., trial lawyer whose efforts forced big tobacco into a $246 billion settlement in 1998 and who is working with Cunningham in a crusade against managed-care companies. Though Scruggs styles himself an advocate for the little guy, he is also a sucker for big, gnarly cases...
Thus began Medica's six-month crash course in U.S. legal, corporate and media customs--the sort of tutorial that more and more global companies must take in countries where they do business. The irony in this case is that a staid Swiss firm has learned the U.S. class-action game well enough to sidestep the punitive damages that have knocked down other businesses--think asbestos--like dominoes. Medica's bold, novel defense may set a precedent for other lawsuit-plagued industries, including tobacco...