Review Set on Shiley Valve Suit Venue : Litigation: Appellate court will take second look at ruling that allows out-of-state recipients to sue Irvine-based maker of heart valves in California.

The state Supreme Court has ordered a panel to review a decision that allows out-of-state recipients of a potentially defective heart valve to sue the device’s Irvine-based manufacturer in California.

About 130 out-of-state recipients who have valves that have not malfunctioned are pursuing legal action because of their fear that the devices will do so. About 300 people have died when the struts in the valves have come apart. But Shiley Inc. and its corporate parent, Pfizer Inc. in New York, have argued that the recipients, by bringing their cases to California, are “forum shopping” for the court most likely to support their claims of fraud and emotional distress.

An estimated 50,000 people worldwide depend on the Bjork-Shiley convexo-concave valves, which were sold between 1979 and 1986. Since then, most of the assets of Shiley have been sold, and its operations in Irvine are now mainly a research center set up to handle the valve claims.

In November, Orange County Superior Court Judge William F. Rylaarsdam ruled that the recipients have a right to sue in California, writing that the presence here of Shiley’s headquarters and millions of documents relating to the valves would facilitate gathering information.

The following month, the 4th District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana denied Shiley and Pfizer’s appeal without explanation. The Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday, however, orders the appeal panel to consider the venue issue again.

“We are pleased with this decision,” Paul S. Miller, Pfizer’s general counsel, said in a statement Friday. He said the company plans to argue that Rylaarsdam’s decision was “contrary to the principles” of a previous Supreme Court ruling that barred non-U.S. valve recipients from pursuing their claims in California.

Even so, attorney James Capretz, whose Irvine firm represents most of the plaintiffs, predicts that the Court of Appeal will reach the same decision as Rylaarsdam.

“We don’t think this is anything but a procedural step,” Capretz said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they will reverse the decision.”

The number of recipients suing Shiley and Pfizer could top 500 once the issue of jurisdiction is resolved. The first trial, involving a recipient from California, is scheduled to begin in July in Orange County Superior Court.

The recipients now taking legal action against Shiley and Pfizer refused to accept the terms of a $215-million class-action settlement approved by a federal judge in Cincinnati last summer. And that agreement is being challenged. Attorney Gary Green, representing recipients living in Pennsylvania, filed an appeal March 1.

A research team at William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., has been experimenting with a computer-assisted X-ray imaging technique that evaluates whether a valve shows signs of strut fracture. Money for the testing comes from a $75-million settlement fund for valve research. In the appeal, Green’s law firm argues that making the X-ray procedure widely available would cost about $110 million a year and that Pfizer misled the federal court about its cost.

But Robert Fauteux, a spokesman for the Shiley Heart Valve Research Center in Irvine, said that costs are “impossible to forecast” until the Beaumont studies are finished later this year.

“We don’t know the dimensions of the diagnostic testing,” he said. “There are a lot of elements that are still uncertain.”