Plaintiff lawyers massively increased spending on ads soliciting clients to sue over Zantac after a Delaware judge ruled there was enough evidence to proceed with more than 70,000 suits claiming the once-popular heartburn medicine causes cancer.
Trial lawyers spent more than $1.8 million on ads in June and July, up from just $3,000 in May, according to X Ante, a research firm that tracks law firm advertising. The spending boom came after Delaware Superior Court Judge Vivian L. Medinilla rejected defense pleas to strike expert witnesses who say Zantac can cause up to 10 different cancers.
Judge Medinilla’s ruling conflicts with a Florida federal judge’s finding that the scientific evidence was unreliable, leading to the dismissal of 50,000 cases.
The Delaware ruling jump-started litigation that has proceeded in fits and starts since a private laboratory first claimed the active ingredient in Zantac could degrade into a cancer-causing chemical when heated. Trial lawyers then paid some $2 million to a second lab to produce similar results, which medical experts then cite to conclude Zantac can cause cancer.
The biggest spender on Zantac ads after Judge Medinilla’s ruling was an Alabama-based referral firm called Negligence Network Attorneys, which spent $1.4 million trying to find clients for plaintiff lawyers, X Ante said. The second-biggest spender was Pulaski Kherker, a Houston firm also active in Camp Lejeune and baby formula litigation, at $264,000. Third was Knightline Legal, a California marketing service that forwards potential clients to law firms, at $10,000.
Boston was the top media market, with $25,000 spent, followed by Cleveland; Lake Charles, La.; Cincinnati; and Duluth. The last four are all industrial centers with lots of potential claimants with age-related cancers that lawyers can also blame on Zantac.
Lawyers have bet heavily on Zantac before. The FDA ordered the drug off the market in 2019 after Valisure, a private lab with close ties to trial lawyers, reported it could degrade into cancer-causing NDMA. The FDA later disputed that finding, but lawyers immediately launched a wave of thousands of lawsuits anyway.
The company is trying to cash in as lead plaintiff in a False Claims Act case that alleges federal and state governments were caused to pay millions for Zantac prescriptions. The feds and states have refused to join the case, as is their option in FCA cases.
The FDA said Valisure's methods were unreliable, saying the lab's "artificial stomach" was heated to 260 degrees and subjected to lethal levels of salt to create NDMA from Zantac. Valisure detected no NDMA in the drug when testing it under normal human conditions,
Still, Zantac was the top lawyer ad target in early 2021, when 376 ads aired on television per day across the country, according to X Ante. The spending dwindled, especially after U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenburg dismissed thousands of cases in her court in December 2022 after finding plaintiff experts used unreliable methods used unreliable methods to conclude Zantac could degrade into NDMA.
Judge Medinilla in Delaware, who is overseeing 75,000 state-court cases, downplayed the significance of the federal court’s ruling, saying “that judges disagree is not remarkable.” She also rejected the defense argument she was allowing plaintiff experts to skip a step in their analysis, by assuming the research by Valisure and others that Zantac could degrade into NDMA was accurate.
Her ruling allowed plaintiff medical experts – at least three of whom are also working for Roundup plaintiffs – to conclude Zantac causes cancer. One of those experts the judge found credible, William Sawyer, testified a two-day exposure to Roundup could cause non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a common cancer closely associated with aging that three-quarters of the time has no known cause.
Judge Medinilla recently rejected a defense request to send her decision allowing the experts to testify before a jury up for interlocutory review. Meanwhile, she plans to set 10 “bellwether” cases for trial, a common strategy for driving defendants to settle mass tort litigation.
Despite their expert witnesses, plaintiff lawyers lost the first case to go to trial, when an Illinois jury rejected claims Zantac caused a woman’s colon cancer. They suffered another loss in Illinois this month and a third trial ended in a hung jury.
Defendants Boerhringer Ingelheim and Sanofi have nevertheless moved to settle 14,000 cases, reportedly for as much as $25,000 per case.