Roundup Lawyers Accuse Bayer of ‘Pay to Appeal Scheme’

Roundup Lawyers Accuse Bayer of ‘Pay to Appeal Scheme’

Introduction

In a letter to the Eleventh Circuit, third-party attorneys said that Bayer is trying to dismiss thousands of Roundup lawsuits by paying the plaintiff who alleged the weedkiller caused his cancer.

The plaintiff will need to pay $100,000 under the "pay-to-appeal scheme" if he decides to drop the appeal. The attorneys for the plaintiff argued that Monsanto failed to warn that Roundup causes cancer, and the appeal challenges Bayer's argument that federal law preempts state law claims.

All the attorneys across the nation who represent Roundup plaintiffs claim that the company completely failed to issue the warning of Roundup causing cancer.

This is the first case that Monsanto has won on the grounds of failure to warn the issue of Roundup causing cancer. The company even admitted that it paid the plaintiff to appeal the issue to court. The counsel for the plaintiff and Monsanto agreed on a settlement only if the appeal limits to failure to warn the issue.

Attorneys for the plaintiff admitted that if there were no agreement, he wouldn't have prosecuted the case at the district court level due to the lack of scientific evidence to support his particular cancer allegations.

The spokesperson for Bayer stated that the company wants to maintain transparency in appealing about the failure-to-warn about Roundup in the lawsuits on federal preemption grounds. The company has already resolved tens of thousands of claims, and its ultimate goal is to prevent new cases.

Bayer is constantly facing litigations since 2018 after purchasing Monsanto CoIt has even agreed to pay $11.6 billion to resolve Roundup lawsuits from about 125,000 consumers and farmers in the U.S.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria is overseeing all the Roundup lawsuits in the Northern District of California under MDL No. 2741.