Trail v. 3M Company

Background

Six plaintiffs—Steven Trail, Kevin Kane, Robert Taylor, Jeff Hall, Vincent Gonzales, and Anthony Skaalerud—sued 3M Company and Aearo Technologies LLC in Minnesota state court. Each plaintiff alleged a single product-liability claim based on failure to warn. They alleged that they used 3M’s commercially available Combat Arms Earplugs, Version 2, did not receive instructions about the proper modified wearing technique, and suffered hearing loss and tinnitus.

3M removed the cases to federal court under the Federal Officer Removal Statute, arguing that the federal government-contractor defense applied. The plaintiffs moved to remand, meaning they asked the federal court to return the cases to state court. The court considered the six cases together under consolidated briefing.

Court’s analysis

The court explained that federal law can permit removal of a state-law case when a defendant acts under federal authority. The government-contractor defense can protect a contractor from certain state tort claims involving military equipment when the government approved reasonably precise specifications, the equipment matched those specifications, and the contractor warned the government about relevant dangers. The party seeking removal bears the burden of showing that removal was proper.

The parties agreed that the court’s earlier decision in a prior related proceeding, Graves v. 3M Co., controlled unless the current complaints materially differed. In that earlier decision, the court concluded that 3M had not shown that the government controlled the warnings on the commercially available earplugs or required 3M to issue those warnings in a particular way.

3M argued that the current complaints differed because they used terms such as “defective,” “dangerous design defect,” and “imperceptible to the wearer.” The court rejected that argument. It held that the complaints still asserted only failure-to-warn claims, not defective-design claims. The court explained that failure-to-warn and defective-design claims have different required elements under Minnesota law, and merely alleging that a product was defectively designed does not create a separate defective-design claim.

The court also applied issue preclusion, a rule that can prevent a party from relitigating an issue already conclusively decided. It found that the relevant issue was the same as in the earlier related proceeding: whether 3M could invoke the federal-contractor defense against a civilian plaintiff asserting only a failure-to-warn claim. The court rejected 3M’s argument that other decisions prevented preclusion, explaining that the other cases involved defective-design claims or failure-to-warn claims paired with defective-design claims.

Disposition

The court concluded that the plaintiffs’ design-related allegations did not transform their failure-to-warn claims into defective-design claims. It found that 3M was precluded from asserting federal jurisdiction on the stated basis and could not show that “the Government made me do it” regarding the warnings. The court granted the plaintiffs’ motions to remand in all six cases: Trail, Kane, Taylor, Hall, Gonzales, and Skaalerud. It directed that judgment be entered accordingly. The order addressed removal and remand; it did not decide whether the plaintiffs would ultimately prevail on their failure-to-warn claims.