CHICAGO — A federal judge has ruled in favor of Riddell in a series of so-called bellwether claims in which former high school football players sought to hold the helmet-maker liable for their injuries.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly’s Jan. 10 opinion follows an August 2019 ruling in which he denied class certification to 16 former high school and college football players who sued BRG Sports and its subsidiary, Riddell Sports Group, both based in suburban Des Plaines. Riddell has been the market leader in football helmets since at least the 1970s, according to court papers, and the plaintiffs alleged BRG failed to improve helmets consistent with emerging knowledge of football-related head injuries.
Kennelly said Riddell faces dozens of lawsuits in which former high school players allege the company’s helmets have inadequate warnings, contributing to their “brain and neurocognitive injuries." So the judge selected four individual complaints, involving seven players from Iowa and Texas, to serve as so-called “bellwether” cases, to help determine the viability of the former football players' claims.
Vincent Circelli
| Superlawyers.com
The bellwether claims proceeded through discovery. Riddell then moved to strike two of the plaintiffs' expert witnesses and sought summary judgment against all four plaintiffs.
The plaintiffs’ football careers spanned from the mid 1970s to early 2000s. Relevant to the litigation, Kennelly said, is that all Riddell helmets since 1983 carried a warning label reading “Do not use this helmet to strike an opponent. Such an action is against football rules and may cause severe brain or neck injury. Playing the game of football in itself can cause injury, and no helmet can prevent all such injuries.”
In their allegations, the plaintiffs said the label was misleading because it implied protection against injury for players who adhered to football rules. They also said the company possessed, but did not disclose, “superior knowledge” about helmet risks as far back as the 1970s. Riddell introduced the Revolution product line in 2003, stating it was 31 percent safer than other helmets. But the players allege those safety claims “were similarly misleading and failed to effectively disclose the long-term dangers these players would be exposed to while wearing the Riddell helmets.”
In April 2021 Kennelly granted summary judgement to Riddell in design defect claims, while preserving the failure to warn claims. Following that ruling, Riddell moved to exclude testimony from Michael Motley, warnings expert, and Dr. Randall Benson, a causation expert, and said if either were excluded, that would undercut the elements of the failure to warn allegations.
Although Kennelly said Motley is a qualified expert based on “decades of experience and the subject matter of his writings,” he said Motley’s testimony regarding Riddell’s warnings wasn’t sufficiently reliable. At a deposition, Motley said “an opinion about a warning's efficacy is merely a hypothesis absent empirical testing,” Kennelly wrote, but Motley did no such testing on the helmets.
“Motley conceded that he had made no effort to determine whether there are any industry standards for football helmet warning labels, despite acknowledging that one would want to know that information to properly evaluate a warning,” Kennelly wrote. “He also said he had never seen a Riddell helmet in real life, so he was unfamiliar with the relative size and location of the specific warning label at issue.”
Kennelly also said Riddell successfully challenged Benson’s opinion on specific injury causation, noting “Benson admitted he did not review the plaintiffs’ individual medical records, let alone conduct any case-specific analysis on these records. This admission likely explains why his causation report for each plaintiff contains the same conclusory statement.”
Although Benson later submitted an affidavit saying he’d reviewed fact sheets for all seven players, Kennelly said the whole of his input doesn’t link his generic conclusions “with his testimony that the types of injuries suffered by the plaintiffs have multiple possible causes.”
With testimony from both experts stricken, Kennelly said, Riddell correctly contended the plaintiffs couldn’t meet their burden of proof. Because he granted summary judgment on those grounds, Kennelly didn’t consider an omnibus motion for summary judgment citing other claimed deficiencies.
The judge also wouldn’t let Riddell “leverage this into a dismissal of the claims of non-bellwether plaintiffs that were expressly put on hold pending litigation of the claims of the bellwether plaintiffs. To do otherwise would amount to a serious violation of due process —dismissing the claims of dozens of plaintiffs without giving them an opportunity to be heard.”
Kennelly did say it’s appropriate to accelerate the remaining cases and ordered the parties to quickly offer proposals to that effect.
The bellwether plaintiffs have been represented by attorneys Vincent P. Circelli, of the firm of Circelli & Walter, of Fort Worth, Texas; Joseph Hawkins Low, of Long Beach, California; and attorneys with the firm of Edelson P.C., of Chicago and San Francisco.
BRG and Riddell have been represented by attorney Paul G. Cereghini, of the firm of Bowman And Brooke, of Phoenix, and others with the Bowman firm and with the firm of Donohue, Brown, Mathewson & Smyth, of Chicago.