By Diana Novak Jones
Feb 25 (Reuters) - Law firms representing nearly 20,000 people who sued Bayer over alleged injuries from its Roundup weedkiller urged a Missouri judge to delay reviewing the German company’s proposed $7.25 billion nationwide settlement, arguing that rushing would violate the rights of cancer patients and their families.
In a filing in a state court in St. Louis that was made public on Wednesday, the firms said the accord should not be fast-tracked for possible preliminary approval
on March 4, fifteen days after the proposed settlement was announced.
The request is the first major organized pushback against Bayer’s attempt to resolve most of the 65,000 remaining Roundup claims in state and federal courts.
In a statement, a company spokesperson said Bayer remained confident that the proposed settlement was "fair to all claimants, and warrants approval by the court."
"We fully expect a robust debate about the class settlement and are not surprised by either the support or opposition from plaintiff firms over recent days," the spokesperson said.
Plaintiffs say that Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, causes cancer, and they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other forms of the disease after using the weedkiller at home or on the job. The settlement would establish a program to pay claimants over 21 years.
The company acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018. It has said decades of studies have shown Roundup and glyphosate are safe.
In the filing, the law firms said they first received the more than 600-page settlement package on February 17, and cannot effectively analyze it quickly. They said Bayer and the settling plaintiffs, in contrast, spent two years negotiating.
Bayer said the settlement would achieve “legal certainty" by ending years of costly litigation over Roundup and glyphosate, the herbicide's active ingredient, while compensating current and future cancer claimants.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago, Writing by Jonathan Stempel, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
