On Jan. 20, the Missouri Supreme Court handed Bayer’s legal team a win by granting a rare motion for a preliminary writ of prohibition to immediately halt a multi-plaintiff Roundup trial in the city of St. Louis. The trial was midway through jury selection and was scheduled to begin Jan. 23.
Bayer’s law firm, Brian Cave Leighton Paisner, said such an action by a court is very rare and touted the ruling as a victory against venue-shopping by plaintiff attorneys. BCLP said the ruling “could shape law for thousands of product liability and mass tort cases.”
St. Louis is regarded as a plaintiff-friendly venue. “Juries in the city of St. Louis have issued outsized verdicts in multi-plaintiff product liability cases in recent years, including a highly publicized $2 billion verdict against Johnson & Johnson in talc litigation, so avoiding a multi-plaintiff trial in the city was a major victory for the firm and its client,” according to BCLP.
In 2019, the Missouri legislature passed a law making clear that cases like this were not properly venued in the city of St. Louis. None of the plaintiffs have any connection to Missouri, BCLP said in its petition, much less the city of St. Louis. Monsanto is headquartered in St. Louis County and its registered agent was located in St. Louis County at the time plaintiffs filed and served their lawsuits. The plaintiffs also have no connection to one another.
The plaintiffs argued that Monsanto had once had a registered agent in the city decades ago, but Bayer’s team said that was incorrect. The underlying trial involved six unrelated plaintiffs from five cases whose Roundup product liability claims against Monsanto had been consolidated for trial
—David Murray can be reached at [email protected].
