Bayer-Roundup Judge Moves to Resume Cancer Trials in U.S.
Bayer-Roundup Judge Moves to Resume Cancer Trials in U.S.
(Bloomberg) -- Bayer AG may face as many as four U.S. trials over its Roundup weedkiller next year after a judge said Monday he’s ready to resume putting cases in front of jurors.
With thousands of lawsuits alleging the herbicide is cancerous still unresolved even after Bayer announced an $11 billion settlement plan in June, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco said it’s time to move forward following a period during which all the federal cases were on hold for negotiations.
Of the handful of cases that are closest to being ready for trial, Bayer will still have an opportunity to argue for their dismissal or try to get plaintiffs’ expert witnesses disqualified. But if the company doesn’t get the suits thrown out or settled, it faces a Jan. 25 pretrial conference for the first case.
“I’ll get to work on those cases promptly,” the judge told lawyers during a hearing, noting that only about half of the approximately 4,000 cases he oversees are subject to settlement agreements.
Bayer said in an emailed statement that due to the pandemic, it doesn’t expect month-long trials to happen any time soon. “We remain fully committed to settling the Roundup litigation and are reaching out to counsel for virtually all not yet settled cases,” the company said.
Settlements in state and federal courts “are being successfully implemented,” Ken Feinberg, the court-appointed mediator for the Roundup litigation, told Chhabria. “We are not there yet but we are making substantial progress.”
Bayer lost three Roundup trials in 2018 and 2019 with average awards of almost $50 million per plaintiff that sent its stock into a downward spiral. The legal threat, based on consumer arguments that Roundup caused their cancer, has weighed on Bayer since its 2018 acquisition of Monsanto, the longtime manufacturer of the herbicide. Bayer lost its appeal of the first verdict -- though it did win a reduction in damages -- and is still appealing the second and third verdicts.
Bayer said last week that it has settled or at least reached general agreements for 88,500 claims, but that it can’t say with certainty that the total number of existing Roundup suits won’t grow beyond 125,000 until the entire settlement process is complete.
If Judge Chhabria moves to resume the next set of cases, “we would expect a negative outcome for Bayer yet again, with juries likely to continue to hand the plaintiffs multimillion dollar awards,” said Anna Pavlik, Special Situations Senior Counsel at United First Partners in New York. “Such jury awards would continue to put pressure on Bayer to come up with a more comprehensive settlement offer, which may entail higher per-plaintiff payouts as well as a possible change of the RoundUp label.”
The vast majority of the unresolved Roundup suits are in state courts and not subject to Chhabria’s deadlines or decisions.
The case is In re Roundup Products Liability Litigation, 16-md-02741, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.