Last month, U.S. District Judge Robin L. Rosenberg, overseeing the Zantac litigation, issued a pretrial order that outlined the information and reports that will be made available to the parties, which are extracted from census forms submitted as of September 30.
The court established the census in April to gather more information about all filed and unfiled claims. The census will enable the parties and the court to have a robust and timely understanding of the scope and size of the litigation and to facilitate early case management decisions.
The order dated October 21 noted that it is now appropriate for the Court to address the parties’ respective access to Census Plus Forms (CPFs) and reports generated by Litigation Management, Inc. (LMI) concerning the data extracted from CPFs that were submitted by the initial set of filed plaintiffs and unfiled claimants.
The order also stated that the information collected is important for the MDL as the product at issue was on the market for almost forty years, in both prescription and over-the-counter versions and in various different formulations and doses, and was manufactured or sold by dozens of different manufacturers (including branded and generic), retailers, and distributors.
The establishment of a bellwether program is expected, which will include a small set of representative cases that will be prepared for a series of early trial dates, unlikely to begin until at least 2022.
Currently, more than 500 Zantac lawsuits are filed in U.S. District Courts nationwide. The litigation was centralized earlier this year under MDL No: 2924 in the Southern District of Florida for coordinated discovery and pretrial proceedings.
