US$417m verdict against Johnson & Johnson over its talc causing cancer opens way for more lawsuits

A massive California verdict in a lawsuit alleging Johnson & Johnson’s talc-based products cause cancer has opened a new front in the litigation, upending the company’s hopes that the cases were only gaining traction in Missouri, legal experts said.

The US$417 million award by a California jury to a California resident suggested so-called forum-shopping, in which parties seek to file cases in whichever jurisdictions seem most favourable, may not be the main problem facing J&J as it wrestles with some 4,800 outstanding talc lawsuits.

J&J, which denies any link between talc and cancer, said it would appeal the verdict.

That verdict was more than the sum of all the previous talc awards, which totaled $307m and were meted out by juries in the same state court in St. Louis, Missouri, in cases filed by out-of-state residents. A fourth of talc lawsuits nationally were brought in St Louis after the first large verdicts there.

J&J has cast the St Louis court as overly plaintiff-friendly and has focused on getting the cases brought by out-of-state plaintiffs dismissed.

“This has very much been about forum shopping,” Howard Erichson, a professor at Fordham School of Law, said about the talc trials. “The fact that there has been a big verdict in California is definitely interesting.”

Corporations have long fought against plaintiffs filing lawsuits in courts favourable to them, and a US Supreme Court ruling in June delivered them a big victory, holding that state courts cannot hear claims against companies not based in the state when the alleged injury did not occur there.

J&J appeared to be an immediate beneficiary of that ruling, which a St Louis judge cited in declaring a mistrial in a talc case involving two out-of-state women. But legal experts said the verdict in the California case, in which venue was not an issue, could shift the focus back to the evidence.