SAN FRANCISCO (Legal Newsline) - Bayer AG has agreed with three of the law firms leading Roundup litigation to settle thousands of lawsuits, making significant progress toward ending claims the widely used herbicide causes a common cancer.
In filings with the federal court in California overseeing multidistrict litigation over Roundup, Andrus Wagstaff, the Moore Law Group and Baum, Hedland, Aristei & Goldman said they have reached binding agreements to settle their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cases. Attorney Aimee Wagstaff won an $80 million verdict, since cut to $25 million, in the first federal trial against Bayer’s Monsanto unit over Roundup last year.
The settlements represent a sharp turnaround for Bayer, which announced an ambitious $11 billion settlement plan earlier this year only to draw fierce criticism from plaintiff lawyers including Brent Wisner of Baum, Hedland. In an August 20 filing, Wisner expressed frustration with settlement negotiations and asked U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria to restart bellwether trials to pressure Bayer into paying more.
At the time, Bayer acknowledged some “bumps in the road,” but said it was confident it could settle all the Roundup cases. Yesterday, Wisner told Bloomberg News the agreements are “a huge step forward for Bayer and Monsanto finding a way through the nightmare that has been Roundup for them.”
Bayer has disclosed some 125,000 Roundup lawsuits, but these settlements should take care of the most expensive 15,000. Wisner helped win two state court verdicts in California including a $289 million award since reduced to $78.5 million. He told Bloomberg he and his colleagues “know where all the bodies are buried.” The remaining plaintiffs, he said, “if they want to pursue this litigation, they’re going to have to do what took us four years.”
Roundup litigation is an unusual mass tort because Bayer still sells the product and says it has no intention to take it off the market. The company fiercely criticized judges in the three trials so far for allowing plaintiffs to present scientific experts who attributed their disease to Roundup by ruling out numerous other potential causes including cancer and age.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers Roundup safe, meanwhile, and explicitly prohibits Bayer from placing a cancer label on the product.