Illinois Southern District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel
EAST ST. LOUIS, ILLINOIS - A judge has axed dozens more lawsuits from the list of thousands pending in Southern Illinois federal court accusing the makers of commercial weed killer Paraquat of allegedly causing Parkinson's disease.
On June 16, U.S. District Judge Nancy Rosenstengel adopted the recommendation of court-appointed special master Randi Ellis and dismissed 69 Paraquat exposure lawsuits for failure to return required plaintiff assessment questionnaires.
Since 2021, as lawsuits have piled in to her court from throughout the country as part of a so-called multidistrict litigation (MDL) consolidating all federal cases before Rosenstengel, the judge has required plaintiffs to submit the 13-page questionnaire, providing specific information about the plaintiffs' claims.
Rosenstengel currently is presiding over about 6,000 lawsuits against Syngenta and Chevron, the companies from whom plaintiffs are demanding potentially billions of dollars in settlements or jury verdicts.
Thousands more lawsuits are pending against the companies in state courts across the country, but primarily in local court in Philadelphia, thanks to Pennsylvania's lax law governing jurisdiction that have allowed the state's courts to become a hotbed of lawsuits brought by plaintiffs who don't live in the state against companies not based in the state.
That law is the subject of a current petition to the U.S. Supreme Court by Syngenta, which is seeking to have Pennsylvania's so-called "consent by registration" statute declared unconstitutional.
In the meantime, as courts have moved closer to the first potential trials on the plaintiffs' claims, the parties informed federal judges earlier this spring that they were in talks to settle potentially thousands of cases pending in federal court, with a settlement potentially near.
On June 20, Rosenstengel ordered discovery stayed in all pending cases until July 21, to allow time for a settlement to be reached.
The discussion of a potential settlement came after Rosenstengel took actions harmful to plaintiffs' cases, including excluding key expert testimony plaintiffs had hoped to use to support their claims. Plaintiffs appealed that April 2024 to the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Proceedings on that appeal have been placed on hold pending the result of any settlement.
Rosenstengel has also lopped hundreds of potentially specious lawsuits from the Paraquat docket, as well, mostly for failure to complete the plaintiff assessment questionnaire.
Hundreds more cases have been voluntarily dismissed under judicial scrutiny. As of fall 2024, more than 1,200 such lawsuits were withdrawn by the attorneys who filed them.
And reviews of the cases have continued since.
Earlier this spring, Ellis recommended the dismissal of 117 more Paraquat cases in the Southern Illinois federal MDL.
Ultimately, that list was reduced to 69 cases, listed on an exhibit presented by Ellis.
Rosenstengel approved the dismissal of the cases identified in that exhibit on June 16.
The cases listed on the exhibit for failure to complete the plaintiff questionnaire included 57 filed by the law firm of Pulaski Kherkher, of Houston, Texas. Other lawsuits on the list to be dismissed include those filed by the law firms of TorHoerman Law, of Edwardsville, Illinois, and Chicago; the Smith Law Firm, of Mississippi; and Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane Conway & Wise, of Chicago and St. Louis.
Other plaintiffs' lawyers involved in the Paraquat mass litigation have asserted that lawsuits in which plaintiffs fail to complete the assessment questionnaires typically have "mostly not viable claims in the first place."
