Roundup Lawsuit Jury Awards Continue to Pile Up, With 5th Straight Plaintiff’s Verdict

A Philadelphia jury awarded $3 million in punitive damages in a Roundup lawsuit verdict returned this week, in the latest of a series of trials scheduled over the next year.

Bayer and Monsanto continue their Roundup lawsuit losing streak, with a Philadelphia jury ordering the manufacturers to pay $3.5 million to a woman diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma following repeated exposure to the glyphosate-based weed killer.

Over the past eight years, Bayer and its Monsanto subsidiary have faced more than 120,000 Roundup lawsuits, each raising similar allegations that users were not adequately warned about the risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from the weed killer, either when using the product in an agricultural setting or around the home.

The litigation began to emerge in 2015, when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decided to classify glyphosate in Roundup as a probable cancer-causing agent.

Although Bayer has agreed to pay billions in Roundup settlements to resolve individual injury lawsuits over the past few years, there are still several thousand unresolved claims involving plaintiffs who rejected settlement offers, as well as new claims that continue to be filed as former users develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

This latest verdict was handed down by a jury in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas on December 1, and is at least the fifth trial loss Bayer and Monsanto have suffered in recent months.

In late October, a San Diego jury awarded a former land surveyor $332 million in compensatory and punitive damages, which was the third Roundup verdict returned against Bayer and Monsanto within a month. That verdict came days after a Pennsylvania jury awarded a man $175 million for Roundup non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and another $1.25 million verdict in St. Louis in early October. A fourth trial, held in Cole County, Missouri, involving three plaintiffs, ended in a $1.5 billion verdict last month.

The most recent verdict was on behalf of Kelly Martel, who says she developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from Roundup. The jury awarded her $462,500 in compensatory damages, as well as an additional $3 million in punitive damages, which were designed to punish the manufacturers for needlessly endangering consumers.

Bayer has indicated it plans to appeal the decision.

December 2023 Roundup Lawsuit Update

While the outcome of this latest trial will not have any binding impact on other claims awaiting trial, it was being closely watched to help gauge how juries in state courts nationwide may respond to certain evidence and testimony that is likely to be repeated throughout the remaining litigation.

Most of the U.S. cases are currently pending in Missouri state court, where Monsanto’s U.S. headquarters are located and it remains a major employer.

In addition to the state court litigation, hundreds of claims are currently centralized in the federal court system before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California, where several large waves of claims are being prepared for remand to different federal district court for trial.