On July 20th, the Wall Street Journal reported that law firm Jones Day has been advising Johnson & Johnson on potentially using a legal loophole to place a subsidiary into bankruptcy to shield the company from the liability of thousands of personal injury lawsuits linking their talc-based baby powder to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.

The article noted that by creating a subsidiary and the putting it into bankruptcy, the company would split J&J talc-related liabilities away from its income-producing assets and transfer them into a newly formed subsidiary for bankruptcy, bringing all the pending lawsuits to an immediate halt and extinguishing all future claims.

It would also provide a single forum for evaluating, estimating and capping the value of personal injury claims leaving injured women and their families to recover pennies on the dollar for the harm caused by J&J.

As of April 2021, J&J was facing 34,000 injury lawsuits across the U.S. over talc-based products, and the number of tort claims continues to grow.

You can find the full article here.