Suboxone Tooth Decay Lawyers Will Meet With Judge To Review 2026 MDL Schedule

Lawyers are currently going through a records collection pool consisting of 500 Suboxone lawsuits, 100 of which will be chosen to move forward as potential early test trials.

A U.S. District Judge will meet with Suboxone tooth decay lawyers and product manufacturers tomorrow, to plot out how the litigation will proceed throughout 2026, as it continues to move toward early “bellwether” test trials.

Suboxone (buprenorphine and naloxone) is a prescription medication sold by Indivior Inc., which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2002, for treatment of recovering opioid addicts. It is designed to help users avoid withdrawal symptoms while undergoing therapy to help them break their addiction.

Originally sold in tablet form, the drug makers subsequently introduced Suboxone film strips, which users place beneath their tongue until they dissolve. However, after the design change, Indivior and the FDA began to receive tooth decay reports from patients, which ultimately led to a Suboxone dental side effects warning being added to the drug’s label in June 2022.

Since then, Indivior has faced thousands of Suboxone tooth decay lawsuits filed in federal courts nationwide, which claim the manufacturer failed to provide adequate warnings of the risks of Suboxone dental erosion, tooth damage and tooth loss.

Given the similar allegations and questions of fact and law raised in each of the complaints, lawsuits filed throughout the federal court system have been consolidated into a multidistrict litigation (MDL) before U.S. District Judge Philip Calabrese in the Northern District of Ohio for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.

Suboxone Bellwether Trials

To help move the litigation forward, Judge Calabrese has ordered the parties to prepare to hold a series of “bellwether” test trials focused on representative cases. These are designed to help lawyers and the court see how juries are likely to respond to evidence and testimony that will be repeated throughout the litigation.

On December 17, Suboxone tooth decay lawyers will appear before Judge Calabrese for the final case management conference of 2025, where the court will receive an update on the status of the litigation and outline next steps toward bellwether trials expected to move forward next year.

According to a joint agenda (PDF) issued by plaintiffs and defendants on December 10, the parties hope to meet for in-person case management conferences on January 21, February 25, July 1 and an unspecified date in April. They also plan to hold virtual status hearings on discovery, as needed, on January 7, February 11, March 11, March 25, April 22, May 6, June 3 and June 17.

Early in the litigation, Indivior argued that many state statutes of limitations gave plaintiffs only two years to file a claim after they knew, or reasonably should have known, that Suboxone caused their injuries. The company contended that the FDA’s 2022 labeling requirement triggered that deadline. As the two-year mark approached in early summer 2024, many attorneys were still in the process of reviewing and vetting a large number of potential claims.

When the parties failed to agree on how to handle the situation, Judge Calabrese allowed plaintiffs to submit a single, bundled Suboxone lawsuit that included limited information on each of the individual claims that remained under investigation. The resulting list included nearly 10,000 Suboxone tooth decay claims, which have been designated as “Schedule A” cases.

According to a status report (PDF) issued by Suboxone tooth decay lawyers, the Schedule A list has been paired down to 5,495 claims. These are in addition to more than 1,800 claims that were filed on separate complaints, many containing up to 100 different plaintiffs.

Suboxone Records Collection Pool Update

In May, the court designated 500 cases for a “Records Collection Pool,” which the parties will narrow down to 100 representative Suboxone dental decay lawsuits that will be eligible for the next phase of discovery. After case-specific discovery on those claims, the parties will then select a group of claims to be eligible for the first Suboxone lawsuit bellwether trials.

Defendants issued a report (PDF) on record collection efforts, stating that progress has been slowed by the replacement of approximately 150 plaintiffs in the pool. Indivior attorneys said records must now be re-collected for roughly 30% of the selected cases.

According to the report, as of December 10 Indivior has sent 6,431 record requests to plaintiffs’ medical providers, and record collections have been substantially completed for 62 plaintiffs. Defendants claim they have produced 5,920 record sets including 257,113 pages of records.

While the outcome of these Suboxone trials will not be binding on other plaintiffs, they will be closely watched to see how jurors may respond to a typical claim. The results of those trials could help the parties in negotiations reach a Suboxone tooth decay settlement agreement, which would prevent the need for thousands of time-consuming and expensive individual federal trials.

If no Suboxone settlement is reached, Judge Calabrese could begin remanding thousands of individual claims to their originating court for individual trial dates.

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