Aimee H. Wagstaff

Hardeman v. Monsanto

Edwin Hardeman used Roundup for more than twenty-five years before developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Aimee H. Wagstaff helped try the first federal Roundup bellwether, presenting exposure, epidemiology, toxicology, medical causation, warning history, and the company record.

The final judgment was approximately $25.3 million. The Ninth Circuit affirmed the liability finding and judgment and rejected Monsanto’s argument that federal pesticide law displaced Hardeman’s California failure-to-warn claim.

The First Federal Bellwether

Hardeman was the first case tried in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation. Its common discovery, expert testimony, and company documents were tested through the exposure history, diagnosis, and damages of one plaintiff.

As national co-lead counsel, Wagstaff helped direct the common work, then stood before the jury with one Northern California property and one medical history. The vast litigation narrowed to the years Hardeman held a sprayer in his own hands. Every expert had to speak to his dose. Every company document had to meet the warning that reached his container.

Four Women in West Virginia

Several years before Hardeman, Wagstaff joined a trial team representing four women injured by Boston Scientific pelvic-mesh devices. Each woman had received an Obtryx sling intended to treat stress urinary incontinence. Their cases were tried together in federal court in West Virginia.

The month-long trial required jurors to understand how mesh behaves inside living tissue. The lawyers showed how its material and pore size affect contraction, erosion, and pain, and what physicians had been told before implanting the device. The product evidence stayed the same, but each woman had undergone a different surgery and lived through different complications and treatment.

The jury awarded a combined $18.5 million. The joint trial allowed four women to present common product evidence while requiring separate findings about each woman’s surgery, complications, and damages. That balance became central to Wagstaff’s mass-tort practice: shared discovery and experts could reduce duplication, but each client still needed an individual medical and damages case.

Courts later appointed Wagstaff to leadership roles in pelvic-mesh proceedings involving Boston Scientific and in litigation over power morcellators. Those positions involved common discovery, expert strategy, and trial planning for thousands of claims involving intimate medical injuries.

The Aspen Table

In 2013, Wagstaff founded Women En Mass and convened its first retreat in Aspen. Wagstaff founded the organization because women represented large numbers of injured clients and tried major product cases but received only a fraction of the leadership appointments controlling discovery, experts, settlements, and trial assignments.

MDL appointments often reinforce themselves: the first appointment creates experience that helps secure the next, while lawyers excluded at the start remain easier to exclude later. Women En Mass built a network in which lawyers could learn one another’s work, assemble teams, and place complete trial records before judges making those selections.

In 2015, the federal power-morcellator litigation produced the first majority-women plaintiffs’ steering committee in a major multidistrict proceeding. Wagstaff served as co-lead counsel.

Women En Mass connected lawyers for co-counsel relationships, referrals, and shared expertise during litigation that required years of travel, depositions, briefing, and trials.

Ground and Water

Wagstaff grew up on a ranch in Kansas. Chemicals used on land arrived there as ordinary tools, attached to weather, labor and the practical need to control what grows. She studied marine science and communications before earning her law degree at the University of Denver. Science taught systems and exposure; communications taught the distance between technical knowledge and the words that reach the public.

She began her career inside a defense firm and later founded her own plaintiff practice in Denver. That passage gave her an intimate view of how product cases are built from both sides: the attack on causation, the narrowing of warnings, the effort to separate a company document from the injury at counsel table.

Common Evidence and Individual Injury

Wagstaff’s major cases operate at two scales. National litigation organizes a shared record of company documents, regulatory history, epidemiology, expert disciplines, and product design. Trial narrows that record to one plaintiff: what the person used or received, what reached the body, what injury followed, and what warning was missing.

In Hardeman, the common record concerned a herbicide sold across the country, while the verdict depended on one property, one pattern of spraying, and one diagnosis. The pelvic-mesh trial used shared design and warning evidence for four women, then required a separate account of each implantation, complication, treatment, and loss.

The bellwether also disciplines the larger docket. A phased trial forces common scientific propositions to withstand cross-examination before company conduct can enter. The resulting record shows other plaintiffs and defendants which expert opinions, documents, and causation theories can survive the courtroom rather than remaining persuasive only inside a brief.

Who Helps Build the Litigation

Women En Mass addresses the same problem inside the profession. Judges appoint leadership counsel to direct shared discovery, choose experts, prepare bellwethers, negotiate settlements, and present evidence that thousands of cases may later use. Wagstaff created a network where women could document the mass-tort work they had already done and seek those appointments on that record.

The organization’s practical premise matches her trial practice: aggregate procedure should not make individual contribution disappear. In court, the shared evidence must still serve a named plaintiff. In leadership, the national docket should remain open to lawyers who have done the work but were not part of the familiar appointment cycle.

What Reaches the User

Product cases often begin with knowledge dispersed among laboratories, regulatory files, medical literature, and internal correspondence. The person using the product receives a label. Wagstaff’s trial work connects those two records: what the manufacturer knew and what the user was told.

That connection gives her docket coherence beyond any one product. A Kansas ranch, marine science, communications, medical devices, and pesticides return to the same practical question. A complex product enters ordinary life with instructions and assurances; litigation tests whether those words kept pace with the knowledge behind them.