Roundup Cancer Trial Updates

Roundup Cancer Trial Updates

Introduction

On Wednesday, February 13, a federal judge indicated that he might toss a Roundup lawsuit involving claims filed by a plaintiff claiming that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide was the reason for his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. However, the man's lawyer got a second chance to get the case to trial in May this year.

The judge heard arguments on Monsanto's summary judgment motion, which stated the plaintiff's claims fall outside the two-year statute of limitations, hence are time-barred. The plaintiff's argued that the plaintiff was unaware that Roundup was the cause of his cancer until the International Agency for Research on Cancer released a report in 2015, about glyphosate's carcinogenic nature. The plaintiff sued Monsanto 12 days after the statute of limitations expired on his claims in September 2016 and Judge Chhabria told him, the claims can proceed only after a successful argument for tolling the statute of limitations. During a daylong pretrial hearing, Judge Chhabria criticized the opinion offered by plaintiffs' expert witnesses for an upcoming bellwether trial calling the opinions as "low quality" and told the witnesses' evidence was too weak to be testified. The federal judge questioned the credibility of the plaintiffs' specific causation experts since their testimony relates to another plaintiff who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2015. The judge, however, stated it is yet not decided that their opinions fall "so far outside the range of acceptable possible opinions" that it must be excluded based on Ninth Circuit precedent. Judge Chhabria said, "when you [consider] Ninth Circuit law, you come away with a pretty strong feeling that the Ninth Circuit is more tolerant of shaky expert opinions than other circuits. The Ninth Circuit ties trial judges' hands more tightly than [others]."

More than 600 Roundup lawsuits are pending in the federal court system where Judge Vince Chhabria overlooks the consolidated lawsuits in the multidistrict litigation (MDL No. 2741; In Re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation).