There are reports that Maplewood-based 3M has agreed to pay more than $5 billion to cover a lawsuit claim for selling the U.S. Military defective combat earplugs. That's about half of what financial analyst say 3M would have to pay if the lawsuits went to trial.
According to the lawsuits, the earplugs were defective for more than a decade. Government records showed more than 900,000 tinnitus claims were filed with the Veterans Administration in 2012 and experts say those claims keep rising every year.
“Sounds like 3M negotiated a pretty good deal for itself, given this litigation has been weighing on them for the better part of a decade,” said Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor who teaches about product liability cases told Bloomberg.
A 3M representative said the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.
Analysts at Barclays had estimated that the company’s potential liability was about $8 billion. Bloomberg Intelligence calculated it could be as much as $9.5 billion.
Costly Verdicts
The accord would end a fairly long list of litigation facing the Minnesota company even as it faces thousands of other lawsuits over PFAS “forever chemicals” likely to cost several times more than the earplug deal to resolve. 3M has lost 10 of 16 early trials over the earplugs so far, with over $250 million awarded to more than a dozen service members.
The hundreds of thousands of lawsuits have been consolidated in a multi-district litigation before a federal judge in Florida for pretrial information exchanges and test trials, according to federal court records. In the suits, current and former service members allege 3M knew its earplugs were too short to work effectively and that it failed to warn the US government or users, or to take steps to fix the product.
Under the terms of the settlement, 3M will pay out the money over five years, said the people, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the accord. They said 3M’s board still must sign off on the deal.
In May, 3M cut around 1,100 jobs at their headquarters in Maplewood.
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