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Monsanto MDL Judge Threatens Atty Sanctions As Trial Starts

February 25, 2019 in In The News

Law360 | By Dorothy Atkins

A California federal judge overseeing a high-profile jury trial over claims Monsanto‘s Roundup weedkiller causes cancer blasted the plaintiff’s attorney on the first day of trial Monday, saying she’d intentionally revealed restricted information in her opening statements for the trial’s first phase, and threatening her with sanctions.

During the first hour of opening arguments, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria interrupted plaintiff Edward Hardeman’s attorney, Aimee H. Wagstaff of Andrus Wagstaff, multiple times. The judge instructed her to “move on” from certain topics that strayed too far afield from whether Monsanto’s herbicides generally cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and whether it specifically caused Hardeman’s cancer.

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Bayer today provided an update on its five-point plan to address future Roundup™ litigation risk after its May 27th decision to withdraw from the national class process. The company is now in more control of important aspects of the risk mitigation process and has sketched out two basic scenarios going forward to provide a path to closure of this litigation. The first scenario is based on obtaining a favorable decision by the United States Supreme Court on a cross-cutting issue like federal preemption which would effectively and largely end the U.S. Roundup™ litigation. The second scenario assumes that the Supreme Court either declines to hear the Hardeman case or issues a ruling in favor of plaintiff – in that case the company would activate its own claims administration program.

Read about the five-point plan here.