Hair Relaxer Injury Lawsuit Against L’Oreal, Strength of Nature Cleared To Move Forward

Georgia Court of Appeals has reinstated claims brought in a hair relaxer lawsuit, after overturning a determination by a lower court that the case was barred by the state’s statute of repose.

The Georgia Supreme Court is allowing a hair relaxer injury claim to proceed, after rejecting arguments that the plaintiff waited too long to file a complaint.

In October 2022, a Georgia woman named Kiara Burroughs filed a product liability lawsuit against L’Oreal and Strength of Nature, alleging that she developed uterine cancer after years of using their hair relaxer products. The lawsuit came just days after a study was released linking chemical straighteners to increased cancer risks.

However, the manufacturers convinced a lower court that Burroughs’ lawsuit was time-barred because of when she first stated using the products, which was 27 years earlier in 1995. The state’s highest court has now reversed that decision.

Burroughs’ complaint is one of thousands of hair relaxer injury lawsuits filed in state and federal courts throughout the U.S., each raising similar allegations that manufacturers failed to warn women about the risk of ovarian cancer, uterine cancer and other side effects caused by endocrine disrupting chemicals in the popular hair straighteners.

The majority of the litigation is currently consolidated as part of a multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the Northern District of Illinois, where U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland is presiding over coordinated discovery in more than 11,000 lawsuits. However, a number of claims have also been filed in various different state courts, including Georgia, Illinois and others.

Georgia has a law known as statute of repose, which requires a plaintiff to file a product liability lawsuit within 10 years of purchasing the product.

L’Oreal and Strength of Nature argued that since Burroughs first bought and began using their hair relaxer products in 1995, she had waited too long to file her lawsuit. The companies were able to convince the trial court to dismiss the claims, and Burroughs then appealed the dismissal up to the Georgia Supreme Court, after a Court of Appeals also sided with the defendants.

In a unanimous opinion (PDF) issued on October 15, the high court rejected the defendants’ arguments and reinstated Burroughs’ lawsuit, noting that her claim was not time barred because she continued to purchase those products for years, determining that “the statute of repose is applied on a per-unit basis.”

The justices remanded the lawsuit back to the court of appeals, reversing its decision.

Federal Hair Relaxer Lawsuits

At the federal level, hair relaxer lawsuits continue to move toward a series of early test trials that could have a significant impact on the litigation. Early in the MDL, Judge Rowland instructed the parties to prepare a series of bellwether cases, which are designed to give participants in the lawsuits a sense of how juries are likely to respond to evidence and testimony that may be repeated throughout the litigation.

In May, plaintiffs and manufacturers selected 32 hair relaxer lawsuits that will serve as the initial bellwether discovery pool, and be eligible for the first bellwether trial dates.

These claims each involve women diagnosed with uterine cancer, ovarian cancer or endometrial cancer after regular chemical straightener exposure and are expected to go through case-specific discovery and depositions over the next few years, before the parties select a smaller group of claims that will go before juries.

While the outcome of these early trials will not be binding on other women presenting a claim, they will be closely watched by lawyers involved in the litigation and may have a substantial impact on the timing and average amounts of any hair relaxer settlements offered to women diagnosed with uterine cancer, endometrial cancer and ovarian cancer in future years.

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