Jonathan D. Orent

On November 19, 2020, by videoconference, Judge Landya B. McCafferty of the federal district court in New Hampshire heard an argument about a warning. Carrie Barron’s lawsuit against Atrium Medical Corp. was the first bellwether case in the multidistrict litigation over Atrium’s C-QUR hernia mesh, and the base mesh of the C-QUR V-Patch implanted in her was made of polypropylene plastic. The plastic’s manufacturer, LyondellBasell, had put language on its safety data sheet prohibiting use of the product in medical implants, and a 2009 letter had warned the defendants not to use the polypropylene in medical devices. Atrium’s polymer expert, Dr. Stephen Spiegelberg, offered a reason for the warning in his report: “The concerns these manufacturers have about supplying polymers for medical devices result from liability concerns, rather than technical concerns.”

Jonathan D. Orent, the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, asked the judge to keep that opinion from the jury. He called it “the classic type of intent motive testimony” and “squarely within the speculation as to the motives of others,” and he left Spiegelberg free to say that he had seen no evidence the manufacturer had a scientific basis for the language. Katherine A. Armstrong of Dechert answered for Atrium that the expert was describing an industry custom, one that bore on how a reasonable manufacturer would treat a supplier’s notice. Judge McCafferty put the request back to her: “And you’re asking me to allow an expert to opine on the reasons why they put that statement there?” Then she answered it. “That’s classic motive and intent,” she said. An expert would tell the jury that the manufacturer had been motivated “to protect themselves from lawsuits like this one,” and she would not allow it: “It is not happening in my courtroom.” Spiegelberg’s opinion, she ruled, “is not based in his own scientific analysis or expertise, but rather on his acquaintance with representatives of unspecified polymer suppliers.” She ruled the same way on a second Atrium expert, Dr. Steven R. Little.

In July 2022, Orent was in the Rhode Island Superior Court in Providence, trying a hernia mesh case against a different manufacturer before a different judge, and the same resin maker’s warning was in evidence. Paul Trevino, of Hawaii, had received a Bard Ventralex Hernia Patch made with LyondellBasell polypropylene, and Orent was his lead trial counsel. Bard wanted its current or former employees to tell the jurors that LyondellBasell’s warning was driven by litigation concerns. Justice Richard A. Licht kept that testimony out; the court, he later wrote, “refused to allow such testimony because it was pure hearsay.” The month-long trial ended with the jury finding Bard negligent. Both dockets concerned polypropylene mesh, and in both, a judge had to decide what jurors could hear about resin makers’ warnings against using their polypropylene in medical devices.

Lead Counsel Under Case Management Order 3A

Atrium is based in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and its Swedish parent, Getinge AB, acquired it in 2011. The C-QUR cases were consolidated before Judge McCafferty as In re: Atrium Medical Corp. C-QUR Mesh Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2753. The plaintiffs alleged that the omega-3 fatty acid gel and the polypropylene plastic used to make C-QUR mesh were not suitable for internal use. Atrium had recalled C-QUR mesh in July 2013, a recall covering nearly 33,000 units that may have been affected by humidity.

On February 24, 2017, Judge McCafferty held a hearing on who would lead the plaintiffs. She had made Robert J. Bonsignore interim lead counsel, and she said she was leaning toward a single lead counsel and a single liaison counsel: there needed to be “a lead counsel who’s responsive and a liaison counsel who is the organizer.” She added, “I am not going to pick a liaison counsel or lead counsel from anybody who’s not here.” Orent, from Motley Rice’s Rhode Island office, was there. He predicted that the MDL would likely fall “in the 500 to a thousand case range,” and he told her how he meant to go after Atrium’s files: “We want to be very strategic as to the documents we seek.” He named the FMEAs, the failure mode effect analyses, among the documents to seek first.

Seventeen days later, on March 13, 2017, Judge McCafferty’s Case Management Order 3A named Orent lead counsel for the plaintiffs and placed him on a five-member executive committee with D. Todd Mathews, David L. Selby II, Adam M. Evans and Anne Schiavone, with Russell Hilliard of Upton & Hatfield as liaison counsel. The order set out what the lead lawyer owed the court and the other plaintiffs: he was to present the plaintiffs’ position on all matters to the court and to the opposing parties, conduct settlement negotiations without entering binding agreements beyond what he was expressly authorized to make, and monitor co-counsel so that schedules were met and time and money were not wasted. In May 2017 the court created a common-benefit fee and expense fund to pay for the shared work.

Orent came to the Atrium cases from earlier mesh litigation. He told the March 2022 hearing that he had been involved in mesh litigation for almost fifteen years and had begun litigating hernia mesh cases around 2007 or 2008, in the litigation over the Bard Composix Kugel, and that he had been “heavily involved and court-appointed into lead counsel positions in Massachusetts and New Jersey.” He had recently been appointed lead counsel, he said, in the Covidien litigation in Massachusetts. A 2004 graduate of Washington University School of Law, with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester, he practices from Motley Rice’s Providence office and is admitted in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Wisconsin. He chairs the American Association for Justice’s Hernia Mesh Litigation Group and is an adjunct professor at Roger Williams University School of Law.

On October 27, 2017, at 8:45 in the morning in the federal courthouse in Concord, the lawyers taught the science of the case to Judge McCafferty and Judge Charles S. Temple. Orent gave the first half of the plaintiffs’ presentation. Mesh gives a repair a scaffold, he said: “We would like to think about it as rebar in concrete for the repair of soft tissue.” Then he described what the body does with it. “So once you have an implant, the body begins a foreign body reaction,” he said. “Over the first four weeks that scar tissue is going to force a contraction of the graft of about 30 to 50 percent.” He explained the FDA’s 510(k) clearance, in which the agency finds a device substantially equivalent to another device, and added: “Most often there are no systematic studies, no human studies done of 510(k) devices.” His co-presenter, James Matthews, took up C-QUR itself, polypropylene mesh coated on both sides with an omega-3 fish oil gel that, he told the judges, was meant to “go away over 90 to 120 days.”

At the 2022 hearing Selby, of Bailey Glasser, described what the shared work had involved: millions of documents reviewed and coded for depositions, an extensive discovery fight over 160,000 documents, and about sixty fact and expert depositions.

Whether Getinge AB Could Be Held in New Hampshire

The plaintiffs spent about three years fighting over Atrium’s owner. Getinge AB moved in June 2017 to be dismissed for lack of personal jurisdiction and renewed the motion in October 2018. Selby later said the fight came down to “whether we could keep one of the main defendants in the case.” From September 9 to 11, 2019, Judge McCafferty held what he called “right at a three-day trial.” The parties agreed that the court had jurisdiction over Atrium and that, if Atrium was Getinge’s alter ego or agent, it had jurisdiction over Getinge as well.

Orent opened for the plaintiffs. “Our evidence is voluminous and goes to the strength of the ties that Getinge AB has to New Hampshire,” he said. He took the judge through a consent decree entered on February 3, 2015, after inspections in 2012 and 2013, which he described as an order “to stop the distribution of misbranded medical devices,” and he pointed out that “nobody from Atrium signed the consent decree.” The decree required the corporate defendants to “vest responsibility for all quality system functions” in an individual, and he argued that a Getinge AB employee, Lena Hagman, had held that responsibility. “Getinge AB actively manages the New Hampshire remediation,” he said. He read Getinge’s own words back to the court: its chief executive at the time, Alex Meyers, had announced, “We are merging three business areas into one single company, one Getinge.”

Then he turned to the money. He argued that “the assets have been systematically drained from Atrium to the point where it is only a manufacturing entity,” and that if the court did not reach the parent and the cases went to trial, “there is a very high likelihood that Atrium no longer has the funds and ability to pay a judgment.” That, he said, “damages all 1500 plaintiffs in this case, and that’s substantial injustice.” He asked the court to find jurisdiction through Getinge AB’s direct contacts or, “at a minimum,” to pierce the corporate veil. Mark Cheffo of Dechert answered for the defendants that veil piercing requires “a fraud or a similar injustice” and that the transactions were ordinary corporate practice.

Selby gave the plaintiffs the outcome in March 2022: “The result was for the plaintiffs; that there was successful negotiation and papering of the foreign parent defendant guaranteed to ensure available funds for the plaintiffs’ recoveries.”

Rulings Before the Second Bellwether

Barron v. Atrium Medical Corp. was set as the first bellwether trial and Martha Luna’s case as the second. On November 12, 2020, by video, Orent argued the plaintiffs’ side of each motion Atrium had brought to exclude their experts in Barron. On the breakdown of the polypropylene in the body, he told the judge: “It’s like rust on a bridge, and the important thing for the Court to understand right now is it produces inflammation.” Of Uwe Klinge, an expert in hernia mesh development and biomaterials, he said, “In fact, there’s no better person on this planet than Dr. Klinge to talk about those sort of things.” Ruling on Atrium’s motion against Dr. Scott Guelcher, the plaintiffs’ engineering expert, Judge McCafferty told Atrium’s lawyer: “I’m going to sound like a broken record, I think, because, again, your arguments go to weight and not admissibility.” A week later came the ruling on the resin maker’s warning.

On March 1, 2021, Judge McCafferty decided the pending motions in Luna on the arguments and rulings she had already heard and made in Barron, so that the parties would not argue the same questions twice. She barred Little and Spiegelberg from offering opinions about any polypropylene manufacturer’s reasons or motives for warning against the use of polypropylene in medical devices, a warning her order called “LyondellBasell’s medical implant prohibition.” She denied Atrium’s motions to exclude two of the plaintiffs’ experts, Dr. Scott Guelcher and Prof. Dr. med. Uwe Klinge. She granted the plaintiff’s motion to exclude evidence of the FDA’s 510(k) clearance process. And she denied Atrium’s motion for summary judgment on three counts of Luna’s complaint.

Barron’s trial was set to open with jury selection on July 7, 2021, and to run three weeks. At a status conference on June 15, Judge McCafferty worked through the pandemic arrangements: four people for each side in the well of the courtroom, three reserved gallery seats, an overflow room of fifteen seats, and masks, which vaccinated witnesses could take off to testify. Orent told her that most of the plaintiffs’ experts were flying in from out of town. Atrium wanted to videotape a supplemental deposition of Carrie Barron, and Orent opposed it: “But what I did not say okay to was giving the defendants evidence, newly created evidence, that they could play to the jury in lieu of asking questions of my client.” The judge granted a protective order. The deposition could go forward, without video.

Selby later told the plaintiffs where the bellwether work-ups had led: “It led to one particular bellwether plaintiff to the eve of trial eliciting settlement with the defendants.” Orent said the plaintiffs “had to keep pressure on the defendants throughout this entire process.” The negotiation, he said, “ended up taking the better part of a year to reach agreement,” and the litigation alongside it put “continuous pressure with a real genuine threat of trial on these defendants.”

Nine months after the Luna rulings, Atrium and the plaintiffs’ lead counsel had a settlement. On December 8, 2021, Getinge announced from Gothenburg that Atrium had entered into a settlement agreement with plaintiffs’ lead counsel over the cases pending in the federal court in New Hampshire, where there were then about 3,200 plaintiffs. The settlement depended on participation “by a certain high level of plaintiffs.” Getinge made an additional provision of SEK 600 million to cover the settlement and the litigation’s expenses to date, the equivalent of more than $66 million, and said the settlement would be funded through available funds. Its chief executive, Mattias Perjos, said, “I am pleased that we can put this behind us and fully focus on our core business, and delivering on our strategy.” On December 10, Orent filed a motion asking the court to establish a qualified settlement fund under their confidential Master Settlement Agreement. On December 20, the court granted that motion and the related settlement motions, including a stay of the litigation and the appointment of a special master.

The March 17, 2022 Hearing for Plaintiffs Across the Country

On March 17, 2022, Judge McCafferty opened a hearing by video in the C-QUR litigation. She had scheduled it so that plaintiffs and their individual lawyers across the country could hear about the case and the settlement from the attorneys who had litigated it. About 3,000 cases sat in the litigation. Lawyers for 2,630 of them had already entered the initial data to start the claims process.

Orent explained the deal. “It is rare to have the opportunity to speak directly to the hundreds and thousands of people who have been hurt,” he told them. He explained what kind of case each of them had: a mass tort, in which every plaintiff has an individual lawsuit. “Each one of you has your own burden of proof and your own right of recovery,” he said. He drew a line around his role: “I am not here to tell you about the individual impacts of your case or provide individual legal advice to you.” The specific participation level the settlement required would go to each plaintiff in an informed-consent letter rather than be announced in a public forum, he said, and he put the condition simply: “if we hit this particular numeric threshold, we have a deal, and if we don’t, we don’t have a deal.” He gave the plaintiffs his own judgment of the terms: “having fought this battle over the last five years, we are convinced that this is the very best deal that is available and that we left no money on the table, quite frankly.”

If the deal failed, he said, the plaintiffs kept the ability to try cases: “You know, one of the things that I am is a trial lawyer and we were prepared to try some bellwethers and we would be ready to start trying cases, you know, if that eventuality happens.” Judge McCafferty summed it up: “So basically that puts it back at the bellwether stage is what it does.” Atrium’s lawyer, Katherine Armstrong, told the judge that Atrium had stopped manufacturing and selling C-QUR mesh, “I think in 2019,” for business reasons.

Payment Instructions Orent Would Co-Sign

The motion Orent signed laid out how the money would move. Once the conditions of the Master Settlement Agreement were satisfied, Atrium would pay the settlement proceeds into a segregated account held by Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., as escrow agent, with Peter F. Haugh of The Legal Specialty Group as fund administrator. The money was to be invested in U.S. Treasury debt, other government obligations and cash equivalents, and Wells Fargo could release none of it except on the administrator’s instructions as authorized by the special master. The special master would evaluate each claim and send lead counsel a list of payments to individual claimants, and the special master and Orent would then jointly submit payment instructions to Wells Fargo. Epiq would work out the medical liens, and any money held back for liens beyond what was owed could be distributed only with Atrium’s written approval.

The special master was Ellen Reisman. “My task, put simply, is to decide how to allocate the money that Atrium has agreed to pay,” she told the plaintiffs at the March hearing. She described the questions she would ask of each claim, starting with whether there had been a surgery to remove the C-QUR mesh or some other mesh-related surgery, such as a lysis of adhesions; infections, wound complications and bowel injuries also counted. She would hold back ten percent of the total fund as an extraordinary injury fund, for injuries beyond what the settlement grid provided. Orent walked the plaintiffs through the liens: under federal law, he told them, a person who accepts certain government benefits for treatment of a condition allegedly caused by another’s wrongful act has a legal obligation to repay that amount. He expected, he said, that clients would likely begin to be paid in 2023, and when the judge asked about lump sums, he said, “The vast majority of plaintiffs will receive one or two payments.” He called the settlement “just the beginning of a process for resolution” and then reached for Winston Churchill, starting with “this is the end of” before he corrected himself: “this is the beginning of the end.”

On April 1, 2025, 436 actions were pending in MDL 2753. On February 23, 2026, the court’s Seventh Amended Case Management Order No. 2 ended the direct filing of new cases into the MDL.

A Ventralex Patch Implanted in Kealakekua

Paul Trevino’s abdomen had been operated on before the Bard patch went in. In the early 1990s he suffered a significant abdominal injury that required an exploratory laparotomy, and in 2007 he had a hernia repaired without mesh. On December 24, 2008, Dr. Andrew Fedder, a general surgeon at Kona Community Hospital in Kealakekua, Hawaii, repaired another ventral hernia and implanted a medium Ventralex Hernia Patch.

The Ventralex joins two materials: a layer of polypropylene and a layer of expanded polytetrafluoroethylene, or ePTFE. Dr. George DeNoto III, a surgeon who testified for Trevino, explained that the two materials contract at different rates, causing the mesh to buckle or “potato chip,” and he told the jury that the Ventralex had eroded into Trevino’s bowel. DeNoto based that opinion on a differential diagnosis, on CAT scans of Trevino’s abdomen taken from 2013 through 2016, and on Fedder’s own operative report. Klinge, whose testimony Judge McCafferty had refused to exclude in the Atrium cases, testified for Trevino that Bard’s warnings were inadequate on contracture, on the buckling, breaking and fraying of the patch’s ring, and on erosion.

On October 26, 2017, Trevino returned to Kona Community Hospital in extreme pain, and Fedder operated on a new hernia, unrelated to the 2008 repair. In the course of that surgery he explanted the Ventralex, performed a small bowel resection with anastomosis, and repaired the new hernia. His operative report recorded that “the small bowel was adherent to the mesh in the midline” and “was found to have an area of erosion of the mesh into the small bowel which was entered during the dissection with minimal spillage.” Maria Oka, an operating-room nurse, described the abdomen at that surgery: “It was a complete mess. There was a lot of adhesions crumpled-up mesh with bowel and adhesive tissue kind of all stuck together.”

Trevino then developed a wound infection and an enterocutaneous fistula. He spent some forty days in the hospital and underwent eight more surgeries under general anesthesia. At trial he testified about his dislike of his physical appearance without a belly button, the crater in his stomach, and his fear of surgery.

He sued Davol and C.R. Bard in 2018 in the Rhode Island Superior Court in Providence. That year the Bard hernia mesh cases in Rhode Island’s state court were coordinated before Presiding Justice Alice Gibney as In re Davol/C.R. Bard Hernia Mesh Multi-Case Management, and Justice Licht came to oversee them. Orent and his Motley Rice colleague Donald Migliori served the plaintiffs there as co-lead counsel, liaison counsel and members of the steering committee. Trevino’s case, PC-2018-8437, was the first of the coordinated cases to go to trial. Jury selection began on July 18, 2022.

Roger Darois and the Resin Suppliers

Trevino alleged that Bard made the Ventralex from low-quality polypropylene unsuitable for implantation in the human body, and that Bard chose its materials for price rather than safety. The resin was Pro-fax 6523, made by LyondellBasell.

Roger Darois was Bard’s vice president of research and development from 1995 through 2009. Dr. Thiemo Blank, a research and development engineer at Angiomed, the Bard division that made cardiac stents, wrote to him for help. “I know that you have a lot of expertise with polypropylen[e],” Blank wrote, hoping Darois could “name a vendor and brand name” for the best raw material. Darois forwarded the email to one of Bard’s engineers and explained that Bard bought its polypropylene monofilament “from an extrusion supplier who purchases the resin directly from the resin manufacturers.” Answering Blank, he wrote that “these suppliers will likely not be interested in a medical application” and gave an instruction: “Please do NOT mention Davol’s name in any discussions with these manufacturers.” He also advised “purchasing the resin through a 3rd party, not the resin supplier to avoid a supply issue once the medical application is discovered.” Justice Licht later cited the exchange to Blank among the evidence that Bard may have been aware LyondellBasell did not consider its polypropylene suitable for implantable medical devices.

The resin makers’ material safety data sheets and technical data sheets also came into evidence. LyondellBasell’s sheets, Justice Licht wrote, “in essence, said that the resin was not to be used in medical devices to be implanted in humans” without the manufacturer’s permission. He instructed the jurors that they could consider those documents “only in determining whether the Defendants knew or should have known of the contents of the document”—for what they put Bard on notice of, and not for the truth of what they said.

Fedder, the surgeon who chose the patch, was asked whether it would have affected his decision to use Bard’s product if Bard had not requested permission to use the polypropylene in it. He answered yes, adding: “I probably would not use it until I had more information that they had requested that.”

Each side called nine witnesses, most of them live; one testified remotely and three by video deposition. Orent examined Klinge, who testified remotely; Anne Holland, who testified for Trevino about the 510(k) clearance process and Bard’s application for the Ventralex; and the engineer Robin Shandas. Dennis Costigan of Motley Rice examined Fedder and Guelcher. Annie Kouba examined DeNoto, and on August 10 she took Paul Trevino through his own testimony in person before Jeff Scott cross-examined him. Maria Oka’s testimony came by video.

Orent closed for Trevino. He told the jurors that the ring around the exterior of the Ventralex can buckle and contract, causing internal injuries that force many patients to undergo a later surgery. “4000 people hurt severely by this device in the last 3 years alone,” he said. “25 percent, one in four people that were implanted with this device had another surgery to take it out.” And: “Trust your eyes. Use your judgment. Use your common sense.”

Jeff Scott of Greenberg Traurig closed for Bard. “It’s still on the market today. It was cleared by the FDA. It’s never been recalled,” he told the jurors. Bard argued that the plaintiff had cherry-picked anecdotal cases and ignored patients who had no complications, and that Trevino’s injuries came from his complex medical history and his many earlier surgeries. “We have a safe and effective device that was extensively tested,” Scott said. “Bard had appropriate warnings, Mr. Trevino received appropriate warnings, and there is no mystery about what caused his injuries.” Bard’s witnesses included Dr. Prashant Sinha, a general surgeon who disagreed with DeNoto and criticized Trevino’s wound care, and Karen Trautman, a former FDA employee who testified about the 510(k) clearance process—the kind of evidence Judge McCafferty had excluded for the Luna bellwether in New Hampshire.

The jury returned its verdict five days after closing arguments, on August 29, 2022. It found Bard negligent and awarded $4.8 million in compensatory damages. “I couldn’t be any happier for the Trevino family,” Orent said. “They sat through a lot. In the end, the jury saw through the blame game and ruled in favor of justice.” Trevino’s own statement ended: “Justice was served.” Orent’s trial team included Christina Behm, Grace Chandler, Dennis Costigan, Annie Kouba, Laura Stemkowski and Hank Young of Motley Rice, and Katherine Charonko, Brian McAlister and Elizabeth Stryker of Bailey Glasser, the firm of two of his Atrium executive-committee colleagues.

Hawaii Surgery, Rhode Island Law

Bard renewed its motion for judgment as a matter of law and moved for a new trial. It invoked the dormant Commerce Clause against the warning claim; argued that DeNoto had not established proximate cause; argued that the jury should have been instructed on an intervening, superseding cause; challenged the admission of the data sheets; and offered a juror’s affidavit as proof of misconduct in the jury room.

Justice Licht rejected those arguments in a decision issued March 24, 2023. On the Commerce Clause, he wrote that “by choosing to apply Rhode Island’s warning requirements to an event occurring in Hawaii, this Court is, in no way, attempting to regulate commerce.” On causation, he held that DeNoto’s differential diagnosis, his review of the scans and his reliance on Fedder’s operative report gave the jury sufficient evidence, if it accepted that testimony, to find that the Ventralex caused Trevino’s injuries. On the data sheets, he pointed to his limiting instruction confining them to the question of notice.

For the superseding-cause instruction, Bard pointed to Sinha’s criticism of Trevino’s wound care. Justice Licht held that Rhode Island law requires a negligent intervening act, and that Sinha’s testimony did not establish negligence. Sinha had said at his deposition that he had not been asked to review the record to determine whether Fedder’s care met the standard of care, and the court had sustained an objection when he was asked at trial whether Fedder’s wound care fell below it.

The juror affidavit failed under Rhode Island Rule of Evidence 606(b). Justice Licht found that it described what had gone on in the jury room and what had moved jurors to agree to the verdict, matters the rule keeps out, and that it identified no extraneous prejudicial information or outside influence. He denied Bard’s renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law, leaving the jury’s negligence finding in place.

Rhode Island Co-Lead in the October 2024 Resolution

Two years after the verdict, the Bard hernia mesh cases in Rhode Island and in the federal multidistrict litigation in Ohio moved into a single resolution process. On October 2, 2024, the plaintiffs’ leadership announced a global resolution covering more than 30 Bard hernia mesh products and creating a path to resolve all filed cases in both Rhode Island state court and the federal MDL. Orent and Migliori negotiated it as the Rhode Island co-lead and co-liaison counsel, together with the federal co-lead counsel Tim O’Brien and Kelsey Stokes and the executive committee chair Michael London, across the table from counsel for Bard’s parent company, BD. Bard’s appeal of the Trevino verdict, which had been pending, was resolved as part of the global resolution.

BD announced the same day that it had reached an agreement “to resolve the vast majority of its existing hernia litigation,” covering “cases in both the Rhode Island consolidated litigation and the federal multidistrict litigation in Ohio.” The agreement covered about 38,000 claims. “The biggest challenge to overcome was the number of plaintiffs across multiple jurisdictions,” Migliori said.

Two Co-Lead Appointments in Philadelphia

Five months before that announcement, Orent had taken a leadership role in drug litigation. On May 8, 2024, Judge Gene E.K. Pratter of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania appointed him one of four plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel, with Paul Pennock, Parvin Aminolroaya and Sarah Ruane, in In re: Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists (GLP-1 RAs) Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3094, the federal cases over GLP-1 weight-loss drugs including Ozempic and Wegovy. Nine days later Judge Pratter died, at 75. A science day set for June 14 was canceled pending reassignment, and the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation moved the docket to Judge Karen Spencer Marston.

On February 23, 2026, Judge Marston named Orent, Aminolroaya and Ruane co-lead counsel in a second federal docket over the same class of drugs, MDL No. 3163, brought by plaintiffs who allege non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy. Grace Chandler, who had been on Orent’s Trevino trial team, was named to the plaintiffs’ executive committee. The order required the co-leads to report at each monthly conference, beginning March 9, 2026, on the inventory of filed and unfiled cases expected in the MDL or in related state court actions, and it turned down the defendants’ request to restrict leadership lawyers’ state-court filings: “the Court declines to impose such a restriction at this time.”

Speaking to Spotlight on America reporters in June 2025, Orent described patients who suffer blindness and bowel blockages, and he said, “we’ve seen more than a few who have actually died as a result of their injuries.” His office gave the reporters a Maryland death certificate for a patient who died in August 2023, listing Ozempic among four items under the causes of death. “It’s clear enough that a coroner or a medical examiner was able to put it on a death certificate,” he said. Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, said it remained confident in the benefit-risk profile of its GLP-1 medicines. Orent said what the cases were for: “These cases are about arming doctors and patients with the information necessary to understand the risks that are really involved.”