"Filthy", "Mind-Blowing", "Legally Problematic" - Federal Judge's Take On Proposed Bayer Roundup Settlement
In a tense hearing on Thursday, a federal judge who has been overseeing thousands of cases in nationwide Roundup litigation expressed scathing criticism of a proposed class action settlement that Roundup maker Bayer is pushing forward in a Missouri court. The proposed $7.25 billion deal, which Bayer and a group of plaintiffs’ attorneys unveiled in February, appears “mind-boggling,” “legally problematic,” plagued with “major problems,” and was filed in a secretive and hasty manner that amounted to a “filthy” deal, US Judge Vince Chhabria said in a hearing over the proposed agreement.
Chhabria, who serves in the Northern District of California, is in charge of multidistrict litigation (MDL) involving people suing the former Monsanto company, now owned by Bayer. Plaintiffs in the cases allege that exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate weed killers caused them to develop cancer and Monsanto failed to warn them of cancer risks. Chhabria has overseen the litigation since 2016, and in 2021 rejected a proposed $2 billion class action settlement filed in his court. Bayer has since paid out more than $11 billion in jury awards and settlements to resolve more than 100,000 claims, but still faces approximately 60,000 unresolved cases. Company officials have said they hope the new settlement plan will help bring the litigation to a close.
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The agreement was filed on Feb. 17. Lawyers for Bayer and the team of plaintiffs’ lawyers joining with Bayer in the deal held a meeting with the St. Louis judge the same day they filed it, without public notice and without a transcript being made of the conversations. Bayer and the supporting plaintiffs’ counsel tout the deal as a means to “deliver billions of dollars of compensation to tens of thousands of plaintiffs.” But opposing lawyers who also represent Roundup plaintiffs were not given notice and were not allowed a hearing to air concerns about the deal before the judge in St. Louis granted the deal preliminary approval.
Those opposing lawyers allege the class action deal arranged between Bayer and the group of supporting plaintiffs’ lawyers enriches that group of plaintiffs’ attorneys while providing little benefit to large numbers of people suffering from cancer who will be covered by the settlement. So far, the Missouri judge has rebuffed their efforts to slow the process of approving and implementing the agreement. In Thursday’s hearing in federal court, Chhabria pressed an attorney involved in putting together the settlement agreement about the circumstances surrounding how and when the class action settlement was filed in the Missouri court. “I’m just trying to understand how this went down,” he said. “The judge knew you were coming in that day. You have a meeting with the judge on the day you filed it, presumably a prearranged meeting with the judge … in his courtroom. It was not transcribed and nobody was aware that this was happening. And then there is no hearing at which anybody has an opportunity to discuss with the judge these concerns,” Chhabria said. “And the judge preliminarily approves the settlement,” Chhabria continued, “which all of a sudden imposes all these significant obligations on people all over the country … and he did that without giving the other side an opportunity to be heard?”
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https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/04/us-judge-calls-proposed-bayer-roundup-settlement-a-filthy-deal/
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