Talc, Rideshare, Powerport & more from the LegalCalls Mass Tort Report

The 2026 Mass Tort Reset: The Cases That Survived the First Test — and the Ones That Didn’t

2026 so far in the mass tort world – Yawn. I don’t think we have seen even one new mass tort that has really scratched that itch. Even the JPML hearings have been a struggle to sit through. The July 30 hearing in Asheville, North Carolina confirms that fact –  even with another full calendar of proposed consolidations, nothing on the agenda was a new pharmaceutical, medical-device, environmental, or consumer-product litigation at all. I suppose if you work in securities or anti-trust, the feelings around the hearing would be different, but for us mass tort litigators, it’s been a quiet six months. So we have to look at the cases that have been working through the system for years, and the news has been a mix of good, meh, and downright awful.

Talc Finds a More Traditional Way Out

The talc litigation, which has spent more than a decade moving through trials, appeals, and failed settlement attempts, reached its most significant moment on July 27, when Johnson & Johnson announced a $5.5 billion agreement designed to resolve the estimated 76,000 ovarian cancer claims pending across state and federal courts. The deal is not automatic; it requires participation from at least 95% of claimants. J&J’s payment obligations are expected to begin with as much as $3 billion in 2027, followed by additional payments. Plaintiffs’ lawyer Chris Seeger, who helped negotiate the deal and represents roughly 2,500 claimants, said the ultimate payout could be more than $7 billion because the agreement assigns values to claims without placing a cap on J&J’s total obligation. J&J’s litigation chief, Erik Haas, continued to call the claims meritless, explaining that the company was settling to obtain closure rather than conceding the science.

The timing makes the deal more interesting than the number alone. J&J had tried three times to resolve talc liability through bankruptcy subsidiaries only to see those efforts dismissed. Traditional litigation resumed in March 2025 after more than three years of bankruptcy-related delay, and J&J subsequently accumulated several useful trial and evidentiary victories, including a July 2026 ruling that raised serious questions about whether individual plaintiffs could prove that talc specifically caused their ovarian cancers. J&J did not settle from a position of obvious collapse. It settled after improving its litigation posture, which is often when a rational defendant becomes most interested in buying certainty at a discount.

For plaintiff firms, talc is no longer a “hot new case.” It is a mature inventory converting into money after more than a decade of verdicts, appeals, expert battles, and three failed attempts to stuff the whole problem into bankruptcy court. If you have a solid inventory of talc cases that have been well organized through years of uncertainty, you are in a very good place.  If not, it’s probably too late to get started.  

Uber’s Bellwethers Finally Put Numbers on the Risk

The Uber sexual-assault litigation produced the year’s most useful pair of bellwether results because the verdicts were both plaintiff wins, yet were almost comically different in value. On February 5, a federal jury in Arizona awarded Jaylynn Dean $8.5 million after finding Uber responsible for the driver she alleged raped her in 2023. The jury rejected Dean’s negligence claims and declined to award punitive damages, but it found that the driver acted as Uber’s agent, creating a path to corporate liability that cuts across Uber’s independent-contractor defense. Dean’s lawyers had sought more than $140 million. Uber later asked U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer to set aside the verdict or order a new trial. The second bellwether, tried in North Carolina, showed a very different side of the litigation. On April 20, a jury found Uber liable in a case involving a driver who allegedly groped a passenger, but awarded only $5,000 in damages. The contrast between an $8.5 million verdict and a $5,000 award shows why bellwether trials matter.

 “Uber sexual assault” is a litigation category, not a valuation category. The severity of the conduct, contemporaneous reporting, medical and psychological treatment, the driver’s history, the rider’s status, state common-carrier law, agency instructions, and evidence connecting Uber’s corporate decisions to the assault can transform two cases sitting in the same MDL spreadsheet into entirely different trial risks. Bellwethers are supposed to expose those differences, and the first two Uber trials did exactly that.

PowerPort and Paragard Receive Their Reality Checks

The first Bard PowerPort bellwether began on April 21 before District Judge David Campbell in Arizona. Robert Cook, a Minnesota colorectal-cancer patient, alleged that his PowerPort became infected, causing a six-day hospitalization and delaying chemotherapy by approximately two weeks. Judge Campbell had denied most of Bard’s summary-judgment motion on March 5, allowing the case to reach trial, but the jury ultimately returned a defense verdict. The result was not a clean defense sweep, although it was certainly not the opening plaintiffs wanted.

The next PowerPort trial is scheduled for August 18 and concerns a fracture-related claim rather than infection. That distinction may prove important because an implanted port infection can arise through several pathways unrelated to the device’s design, while a catheter fracture or migration case may offer plaintiffs a more direct mechanical-failure narrative. The first result told us something about infection claims, but not necessarily everything about a litigation that includes fractures, migrations, perforations, thrombosis, and other complications.

Paragard had the cleaner bad result. The first federal bellwether ended in a defense verdict in early 2026 before District Judge Leigh Martin May in Georgia. The cases allege that the copper IUD’s arms can break during removal, leaving fragments that may require hysteroscopy, laparoscopy, or more extensive surgery. Judge May has scheduled the next trial for September 28, 2026.

PowerPort and Paragard are now carrying fresh defense verdicts into their next trials. These trials will carry additional weight because a second defense verdict can begin to look like a pattern, while a substantial plaintiff verdict can recast the first result as a poor case selection or an injury-specific problem. This is the uncomfortable middle of a mass tort, where everyone has already spent heavily and the jury has finally been invited to comment.

Tylenol Comes Back From the Procedural Dead

The prenatal-acetaminophen litigation produced the year’s most dramatic appellate reversal. District Judge Denise Cote in New York had excluded the plaintiffs’ general-causation experts and entered summary judgment in approximately 550 cases alleging that prenatal exposure to acetaminophen contributed to autism spectrum disorder or ADHD. On July 13, 2026, the 2nd Circuit vacated those judgments, restoring a litigation that had been widely treated as dead and buried. The 2nd Circuit found that Judge Cote had gone beyond the proper gatekeeping role by substituting her own assessment of epidemiological criteria for methodologies used by scientists in the field. Importantly, the panel was careful not to endorse the experts’ ultimate conclusions. It wrote that the opinions were admissible, not necessarily correct, and emphasized that legitimate scientific arguments are generally matters for cross examination.

The Second Circuit also rejected the manufacturers’ alternative preemption argument, explaining that federal regulations require a general pregnancy warning but do not prohibit manufacturers from adding a more specific warning concerning a plausible risk. The case returns to Judge Cote with admissible general-causation testimony and without the immediate preemption escape hatch defendants requested. That does not make Tylenol an easy to win case – locating records remains difficult, confounding by maternal fever and infection remains substantial. Specific causation will be a real problem. It does, however, make Tylenol a live case again, which is better than it looked less than a month ago.

Depo-Provera Is the Case Everyone Is Watching

Depo-Provera may be the most interesting emerging pharmaceutical litigation of 2026 because it has moved unusually quickly from growth phase into a more complicated stage: the parties are preparing for both settlement administration and a fight over the science. The MDL is pending before District Judge M. Casey Rodgers in the Northern District of Florida. The lawsuits allege that use of the injectable contraceptive was associated with intracranial meningiomas and that Pfizer failed to provide adequate warnings regarding the potential risk.

Judge Rodgers’ July 27 CMO added an important layer to the litigation. The court approved a confidential settlement process, including a no-fee administrative docket, with the parties estimating that approximately 80% of MDL plaintiffs may be eligible to participate. Registration is expected to close in November, and the parties anticipate that payments could begin in the first quarter of 2027. At the same time, the court has not placed the broader litigation on hold. Judge Rodgers has already identified replacement bellwether cases and an expert hearing is scheduled for September 18, 2026.

That combination makes Depo-Provera particularly worth watching. The litigation appears to be developing along two tracks: one focused on resolving potentially eligible claims and another focused on determining whether the remaining cases can survive scientific and legal challenges. Judge Rodgers’ experience overseeing the 3M Combat Arms Earplug litigation adds another interesting dimension, given the importance of inventory quality, bellwether selection, and claims administration.

For plaintiff firms, Depo-Provera has many of the characteristics that create serious mass-tort potential: a branded medication, widespread use, a specific and diagnosable injury, available medical documentation, and a defendant with the resources to fund a resolution. But the next phase will determine whether that potential translates into meaningful value.

The September Rule 702 hearing is critical because thousands of claims may exist on paper, but settlement value ultimately depends on whether plaintiffs can present admissible scientific evidence connecting Depo-Provera exposure to meningioma risk. Right now, Depo-Provera is one of the cases everyone is watching; the next few months will determine whether it becomes a major resolution story or another example of a promising theory meeting the difficult reality of pharmaceutical litigation.

AFFF Moves Toward the Harder Half of the Case

The AFFF litigation before District Judge Richard Gergel in South Carolina remains one of the strongest long-term mass torts, but the easy comparisons to the public-water settlements should stop. Those agreements show the real difference between the municipal claims and personal injury claims. In the municipal claims, the costs of testing, filtration, remediation, and municipal cleanup can be measured through invoices, treatment systems, and clean data. Personal-injury claims present a much more difficult question because each plaintiff must establish not only exposure, but also that the exposure contributed to a specific illness, such as kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease, or ulcerative colitis. Judge Gergel’s MDL now contains more than 15,000 cases, with the personal-injury track moving through disease-specific discovery and bellwether development.

Judge Gergel has openly encouraged the manufacturers—including 3M, DuPont, BASF, and Johnson Controls—to explore resolution before personal-injury bellwethers create a more volatile valuation record. The strongest claims are likely to involve firefighters, military personnel, and others with repeated documented occupational exposure, rather than claimants relying on vague environmental contact years before diagnosis. AFFF looks good for the future because the defendants have already demonstrated a willingness to pay enormous sums when liability can be organized and quantified. The remaining question is whether plaintiffs can create a similarly administrable framework for human disease, where causation is harder and every claimant arrives with a unique medical history.

Roundup Takes a Direct Hit; Paraquat Moves Toward an Uneasy Settlement

Roundup suffered the year’s most important defense victory on June 25, when the Supreme Court decided Monsanto Co. v. Durnell. In a 7–2 opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the Court held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act expressly preempted John Durnell’s Missouri failure-to-warn claim because it would have required Monsanto to add a cancer warning to an already EPA-approved Roundup label. The ruling overturned Durnell’s $1.25 million verdict and supplied Bayer with a broad weapon against thousands of similar state-law warning claims. Roundup is not necessarily over, because individual complaints may include design-defect, negligence, fraud, warranty, or other theories that require separate analysis. Still, the litigation’s most repeatable theory has been sharply narrowed, and Bayer’s stock rose approximately 16% after the decision – Wall Street’s subtle way of saying it believes the case became much cheaper to resolve.

On the other hand, the Paraquat MDL has remained under repeated settlement-related stays. This is absolutely good news. Word on the street is that Syngenta has already entered a master settlement agreement to resolve  thousands of Parkinson’s disease claims, but details are slim. Stay tuned. Judge Rosenstengel has continued the stays to allow the settlement  process to unfold.

Craig’s note – LegalCalls has extensive experience with Paraquat and we know how to find claimants with Parkinson’s diagnoses. If your firm is not already involved in settlement negotiations then right now might be the perfect time to get involved.

What the First Seven Months of 2026 Actually Tell Us

Even if we don’t have an amazing new MDL to talk about yet, the market is still strong and there are active cases right now giving us some really big numbers (or tragic defense verdicts). The last months of the year are certain to be filled with important bellwether trials, new motion practice, and decisions, orders, and news from around the mass tort world. We will be here to bring it to you.

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