Defendant
1 case as defendant.
DePuy Synthes, Inc. is the orthopedics business of Johnson & Johnson, operating within the J&J MedTech segment. Its lineage traces to DePuy Manufacturing, founded in Warsaw, Indiana, in 1895 by Revra DePuy; J&J acquired DePuy in 1998 and Swiss trauma/orthopedics firm Synthes in 2012, combining them as "DePuy Synthes." Principal offices include Warsaw, Indiana; Raynham, Massachusetts; West Chester, Pennsylvania; and Solothurn, Switzerland. It is a wholly owned J&J subsidiary — J&J announced in October 2025 that it would separate the unit, targeting completion by mid-2027, with reports in September 2026 of Apollo Global Management talks valuing it near $20 billion (J&J may also pursue a spin-off). The unit reported roughly $9.3 billion in 2025 revenue, about 10% of J&J's total, and employs on the order of 19,000 people worldwide.
Products/operations. DePuy Synthes designs, manufactures, and sells orthopedic devices across joint reconstruction (hip, knee, and shoulder implants), trauma, spine, sports medicine, craniomaxillofacial, power tools, and biomaterials. Named product lines include the Attune knee system and Velys robotic-assisted surgery platform. It is an operating company, not a patent-holding entity.
Patent-litigation posture. In the tracked data, DePuy Synthes appears solely as a defendant (1 case, 0 as plaintiff), consistent with a large operating company defending against infringement claims rather than asserting patents. The single tracked suit, Conformis, Inc. v. DePuy Synthes, Inc., was filed on 2021-04-30 in the District of Delaware — a common venue for medical-device patent suits, not a plaintiff-friendly outlier like the Eastern District of Texas.
Case context. In that case, Conformis — a maker of patient-specific knee and hip implants — asserted patents covering patient-specific instrument systems and surgical tools, targeting DePuy Synthes' TRUMATCH patient-specific instrumentation for knee and shoulder surgery. The same Conformis portfolio was asserted in parallel against other orthopedic competitors. Separately, DePuy Synthes has faced large-scale product-liability litigation over its ASR hip implants, though that is distinct from the patent case tracked here.
Sources: Wikipedia (DePuy Synthes); J&J press materials; Reuters/Bloomberg and MassDevice coverage of the planned separation; RPX litigation records.
Conformis sued DePuy Synthes in the District of Delaware. The case was pending at the pleading/discovery stage. Narrative states the '983 patent was not identified as asserted in this case; various 10/xxxxxxx patents are mentioned in the DePuy Synthes action but not specified.