SAN FRANCISCO - The lawyers pushing claims Roundup-brand weedkiller is lethal to people will now have access to the due diligence performed by Bayer before it bought the product's maker, Monsanto.
California federal judge Richard Seeborg on Aug. 15 allowed lead counsel in consolidated lawsuits alleging Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to intervene in another case.
That case is brought on behalf of stockholders of Bayer upset with the 2018 purchase of Monsanto and claims executives made false and misleading statements about the due diligence it performed when analyzing the costs of Roundup lawsuits. A $38 million settlement in it is pending final approval.
Bayer is paying nearly $11 billion to settle a large amount of personal-injury cases but still faces plenty more. Victories at trial for the companies are often overshadowed in headlines by massive verdicts, like more than $2 billion in Philadelphia last year.
Weitz & Luxenberg and The Miller Firm are co-lead counsel in a multidistrict litigation proceeding that handles personal-injury claims and recently sought to intervene in the shareholder case to investigate Bayer's due diligence.
"These documents are potentially relevant for many issues within Roundup cases," Seeborg wrote.
"Many Roundup cases assert claims for failure to warn, defective design and negligence, among other causes of actions. Monsanto and Bayer's knowledge, motives and assessment of the exposure associated with potential Roundup litigation before, during and after merger due diligence bears directly on whether they knew of risks about which they were obligated to warn plaintiffs in Roundup cases."
Bayer noted Seeborg's order only applies to cases consolidated in California federal court and not in various state courts and does not resolve whether the MDL judge will allow the documents to be used.
"Bayer maintains that it has already produced more than 3.2 million documents (exceeding 25 million pages) in the Roundup federal multi-district litigation, and believes that the production of additional documents cannot change the core scientific facts that support the safety and non-carcinogenicity of Roundup," the company said in a statement to the Northern California Record.
No personal-injury plaintiff had ever requested these records until now. In its response to the law firms' request, Bayer claimed they were jumping into the shareholder case years too late and on the eve of settlement.
Nearly 200,000 lawsuits have been filed over Roundup, though most countries and research groups have found no link between glyphosate and cancer.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer kickstarted litigation in 2015 when it became the only group to find otherwise. Its then-chairman Chris Portier then left the IARC to work as an expert for plaintiff lawyers.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has forbid Monsanto and Bayer from placing a cancer warning label on Roundup.
