A Missouri state court judge is considering whether to grant final approval to Bayer’s $7.25 billion settlement of tens of thousands of US lawsuits alleging that its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer.
Judge Timothy Boyer of the Missouri Circuit Court in St. Louis heard arguments on 14 September over the proposed deal, which Bayer’s Monsanto unit says would resolve approximately 65,000 claims pending in US state and federal courts. The company denies that Roundup causes cancer and says it is ready to defend the cases in court if the agreement fails.
The settlement would offer payments of between $10,000 and $165,000 to individual claimants. The proposed awards would vary according to factors including the severity of a claimant’s disease, their age at diagnosis and the setting in which they encountered the herbicide.
Some plaintiffs’ lawyers oppose the arrangement. They argued that their clients should not be required to proceed through Bayer’s proposed framework and said the payments are too low. Critics also said the terms would prevent current and future claimants who want a trial from pursuing one.
The objections focus in part on people who may make claims in future despite having no cancer now. Objectors also challenged the proposed settlement’s effort to bind residents of other states. They questioned the $675 million in attorneys’ fees sought by the lawyers who negotiated the deal.
Boyer is not expected to rule immediately. He asked supporters and opponents to file further submissions by the end of the week before deciding whether to approve the settlement.
Bayer announced the proposed agreement in February. It marks the company’s second major attempt to resolve Roundup-related cancer claims since it acquired Monsanto in 2018. Bayer spent about $10 billion in 2020 to settle most lawsuits then pending over the weedkiller.
The hearing came after an unsuccessful attempt by objectors to shift the approval decision to federal court. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed that effort on August 27.
Legal conditions for the litigation also changed in June, when the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act expressly preempts state-law failure-to-warn claims when the EPA has made a definitive determination on product safety.
Hunter Shkolnik, a lawyer whose firm represents 3,000 Roundup plaintiffs, told Boyer that 800 or 900 of those clients initially sought to opt out. He said they later chose to opt back into the settlement after the Supreme Court sided with Monsanto on a key legal issue in June.
The dispute over Roundup has long centred on competing assessments of glyphosate, the herbicide’s active ingredient. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined in 2015 that glyphosate was a probable carcinogen. The EPA has consistently found that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans.
Boyer has yet to say when he will rule, or whether he will approve, reject or alter the proposed settlement. The record before him includes Bayer’s argument that the agreement would resolve a large body of litigation and objectors’ contention that its structure and payment terms leave some claimants without an acceptable route to a trial.
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