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August 18, 2026
NEW YORK — Primary and excess insurers have no duty to indemnify an insured for underlying personal injury suits seeking damages for exposure to ethylene oxide (EtO) emitted from the insured’s manufacturing facility because the policies’ pollution exclusion clearly bars coverage, a New York federal judge said in granting the insurers’ motion to dismiss.
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August 17, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling recognizing a cause of action for damages under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics for an inmate who was injured in a prison gang fight but was not sent to a hospital, a staff nurse at a federal detention center in his Aug. 14 petitioner brief notes that the high court “has refused to extend Bivens to any new context for the past 45 years, across 13 cases,” and says his case should be the 14th “and perhaps the final installment of the Bivens saga.”
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August 14, 2026
MINOT, N.D. — A North Dakota couple who sued seeking compensatory and punitive damages for a traumatic brain injury and other ailments the husband suffered due to exploding storage tanks while he was welding at a hydraulic fracturing site reached a settlement with WPX Energy Williston LLC, according to an Aug. 13 docket entry by a federal judge in North Dakota.
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August 13, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A man who developed cancer after exposure to the active ingredient in Roundup waived his right to respond to a petition for a writ of certiorari filed in the U.S. Supreme Court by Monsanto Co. seeking a grant, vacate and remand (GVR) order of a California appellate panel’s decision to affirm a $28 million combined award against the herbicide manufacturer in light of the recent ruling in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell.
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August 13, 2026
ST. LOUIS — Six weeks after the suit was remanded, a Missouri state court judge granted a joint motion to continue a fairness hearing regarding a highly contested $7.25 billion nationwide Roundup settlement so that the parties may try to resolve “challenges to the validity or invalidity of opt out requests.”
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August 11, 2026
HONOLULU — The Hawaii Supreme Court vacated a trial judge’s reduction of a $6 million compensatory damages award to a smoker with lung cancer by nearly half, writing that comparative fault should not have applied after the jury found a tobacco company liable for an intentional tort, and affirmed that the jury’s $8 million punitive damages award was not precluded by the state’s entry into the master settlement agreement (MSA).
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August 11, 2026
CHICAGO — The Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s grant of summary judgment to Chicago in a wrongful death and failure to accommodate suit filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and related state law after a police officer contracted COVID-19 and died, finding that the record shows that the Chicago Police Department did accommodate the decedent and that his illness and death did not result from COVID-19 exposure that occurred after he requested reassignment.
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August 11, 2026
CHICAGO — A federal district court properly granted summary judgment to the manufacturer of a drain cleaning machine after finding that testimony from experts retained by a man who claims that a defect in the machine caused his injuries was inadmissible, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held.
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August 11, 2026
LOS ANGELES — Two consumers claim in a putative class complaint against Mercedes-Benz USA LLC (MBUSA) that the company violated California’s unfair competition law (UCL) and other laws by failing to warn them that the “raised metallic logo” badge on the driver’s and passenger’s seats of their Mercedes vehicles can become overheated due to sunlight exposure, allegedly causing them both to experience painful burns.
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August 10, 2026
AMARILLO, Texas — In separate orders, the latest of which was filed Aug. 7, a Texas federal magistrate judge denied Amazon’s motions to exclude two experts retained by a woman who says she was injured and her husband was killed in a collision with an Amazon delivery contractor’s truck, finding that Amazon can challenge the experts through cross-examination.
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August 10, 2026
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida appellate panel heard oral argument in a tobacco company’s appeal of a verdict worth more than $34 million to the widow of a smoker who died at 38, in which the tobacco company said the widow failed to meet the standards for reliance required under Florida Supreme Court precedent, while the widow’s attorney argued that evidence that the smoker saw and repeated messages from advertising supports the conclusion that he relied on the ads.
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August 10, 2026
LOS ANGELES — A California jury returned a verdict of more than $47 million for the family of a countertop fabricator in a case that’s one of hundreds of silicosis cases pending in California, many of which are coordinated in the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
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August 07, 2026
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A Florida appellate court reversed a lower court’s grant of judgment in favor of an estate in its lawsuit alleging that an insurer breached its contract by failing to defend its assisted living home insured against the estate’s underlying wrongful death lawsuit, holding that there was no claim made on behalf of the injured resident until the wrongful death action was filed in 2014, which was one year after the relevant policy expired.
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August 07, 2026
MINOT, N.D. — A jury trial was reset for Oct. 26 in a federal court in North Dakota in a case brought by a couple in that state who seek compensatory and punitive damages for a traumatic brain injury and other ailments suffered when the husband was injured by exploding storage tanks at a hydraulic fracturing site while performing a welding job on the connected pipes.
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August 06, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A divided California Supreme Court reversed a lower court and directed entry of summary judgment for Gilead Sciences Inc., rejecting claims that a duty of care is owed to consumers who allege that they suffered injuries to their kidneys, bones and teeth while the company withheld a safer alternative to a concededly nondefective drug used in the treatment of HIV.
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August 06, 2026
OKLAHOMA CITY — A frac technician’s lawsuit against a well services company and the fracking operator for a slip-and-fall incident and alleged discrimination that followed ended after the worker accepted a $200,000 offer of judgment from Rocanda USA Inc., according to the judgment entered in a federal court in Oklahoma.
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August 05, 2026
CHICAGO — An Illinois federal judge granted a motion by a smoker with lung cancer and her husband to remand their lawsuit against three tobacco companies and local retailer Walgreen Co. to state court, finding that the tobacco companies failed to establish that the retailer was fraudulently joined.
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August 04, 2026
SAVANNAH, Ga. — An air carrier and its aviation insurers and reinsurers voluntarily dismissed their complaint in a Georgia federal court that sought contribution and indemnification, alleging that the manufacturer of a business jet involved in a fatal crash was responsible for millions of dollars in hull, crew and passenger death settlements that the carrier and its insurers and reinsurers were compelled to pay.
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August 03, 2026
LANSING, Mich. — A Michigan appellate court reversed and remanded a lower court ruling granting summary disposition to a hospital and rehabilitation facilities in an estate representative’s medical malpractice suit over the death of a senior patient from sepsis, finding that the defendants failed to show a nexus between the alleged negligent treatment of the decedent’s pressure ulcers and the COVID-19 pandemic to establish immunity under the Pandemic Health Care Immunity Act (PHCIA).
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July 31, 2026
CHICAGO — A Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel reversed, in an interlocutory appeal, an Illinois federal judge’s ruling denying remand back to state court “a small subsection of several hundred similar cases” that are part of multidistrict litigation filed against the manufacturers of infant formula that allegedly caused preterm infants to develop necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), finding that the plaintiffs’ alleged lack of intent to pursue claims against a nondiverse defendant was “not an appropriate basis upon which to predicate a determination of fraudulent joinder.”
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July 31, 2026
CINCINNATI — More than 190 class members who opted into the personal injury payment portion of a settlement reached in a case over a chemical release that occurred after a train derailed in Ohio in February 2023 filed an appellant brief in the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, arguing that while the $600 million settlement doesn’t need to be reweighed, the trial court committed six legal errors when it denied their motions for relief from the personal injury payment releases after they discovered what they say is new evidence of fraud and misconduct by class counsel.
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July 30, 2026
ORLANDO, Fla. — A federal judge in Florida issued an omnibus order explaining and memorializing three rulings made during a jury trial that ended in a verdict for Lockheed Martin Corp. on claims that contaminants from an Orlando facility resulted in three children’s birth defects and developmental delays.
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July 29, 2026
CHICAGO — A woman who alleges that her infant daughter developed necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) after consuming cow’s milk-based-infant formula (CMBF) manufactured by Abbott Laboratories Inc. before dying did not show that an alternative warning label would have prevented her child’s death, the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals held in affirming a grant of summary judgment for the manufacturer in the first bellwether case in multidistrict litigation pending in Illinois.
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July 29, 2026
HONOLULU — A tobacco company filed its opening brief in Hawaii state appellate court seeking the reversal and remand of a judgment against it worth more than $89 million in favor of a smoker who developed laryngeal cancer and his wife, writing that the jury’s $85 million punitive damages award was unconstitutionally excessive in comparison to the compensatory damages awarded and that the trial court’s other rulings in the case were flawed.
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July 28, 2026
TRENTON, N.J. — Johnson & Johnson on July 27 announced an agreement in which the company would pay $5.5 billion to resolve the multidistrict ovarian cancer talc litigation and related state proceedings, saying in a press release that the agreement covers some 76,000 claims.