Parvin K. Aminolroaya

In October 2023 Juanita Gantt’s husband found her unconscious on the floor. At 62 she had weighed 242 pounds, and her doctor, agreeing that her risk of diabetes made her a good candidate, had prescribed Wegovy and later Ozempic, both made by Novo Nordisk. “Diabetes is rampant in my family,” she said, and for several months she felt fine on the drugs. At the hospital, doctors found that parts of her large intestine had died, and they removed them. While she was recovering from the surgery she went into cardiac arrest, and the hospital called her daughter to warn that her mother might die. She now uses an ileostomy bag at all times. “I had no warning that this was even a possibility,” she told CBS News in September 2024.

Her lawyer was Parvin Aminolroaya, a Seeger Weiss partner and one of four co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the consolidated federal litigation in Philadelphia over Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drugs. In the same CBS report Aminolroaya said Novo Nordisk had put “hundreds of millions of dollars” into expanding the market for the drugs, “but it hasn’t spent that money on warning patients of the risk of gastroparesis, ileus, small bowel obstruction,” or of the fact that those injuries “can be severe, even if it’s in a rare case.” Novo Nordisk pointed to the label. “The known risks and benefits of semaglutide and liraglutide medicines are described in their FDA-approved product labeling,” the company said, adding that “the allegations in the lawsuits are without merit.”

Whether such a label warned enough, and whether federal law bars a jury from deciding that it did not, became one of two questions Judge Karen S. Marston heard for five days in September 2026 in Courtroom 16B of the federal courthouse in Philadelphia; the other was whether the drugs cause the injuries at all. Federal preemption was the doctrine Aminolroaya had argued as a law student, and most of her job interview at Seeger Weiss was about the Supreme Court case that turned on it.

Wyeth v. Levine and a Job Interview

In her third year at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Aminolroaya argued in the New York City Bar Association Moot Court Competition. She has traced her career to the conversation that followed with the founders of Seeger Weiss, Christopher A. Seeger and Stephen A. Weiss. “I had just argued an important issue relating to federal preemption, which had come before the Supreme Court in 2008,” she said. “Most of the interview was talking about the impact of this Supreme Court decision,” she said, naming Wyeth v. Levine. The firm seldom hired new graduates, she said; “they made an exception for me.” She joined Seeger Weiss in 2008, her first job out of law school, and has stayed there since.

The Supreme Court heard Wyeth v. Levine on November 3, 2008. Diana Levine, a professional musician, had been given Phenergan, an antihistamine used to treat nausea, by IV push; the drug entered an artery, she developed gangrene, and doctors amputated first her right hand and then her entire forearm. A Vermont jury found Phenergan defective because of inadequate warnings and instructions and awarded $7.4 million. Wyeth, the manufacturer, argued that the FDA’s approval of its label gave it a complete defense. On March 4, 2009, Justice Stevens wrote for the Court: “The question we must decide is whether the FDA’s approvals provide Wyeth with a complete defense to Levine’s tort claims. We conclude that they do not.” The manufacturer, he wrote, “bears responsibility for the content of its label at all times.” Seventeen years later, Eli Lilly cited the decision to Marston in setting out the standard under which, it argued, the GLP-1 claims were preempted.

Aminolroaya is the daughter of Guatemalan and Iranian immigrants, grew up in the Bronx, and was a debate team champion at Brooklyn Tech. She graduated from Fordham University in 2004 and from Cardozo in 2008, where she received the Jacob Burns Medal for her contribution to moot court, and she speaks conversational Spanish and Persian. She has explained her name: “My last name in Persian means faithful to the people. I’ve tried to stay true to that.” Asked why she became a lawyer, she answered: “Some have told me that I like the fight.” And: “I say that I like to advocate for my clients and to advance justice where there’s been wrongdoing.”

At Seeger Weiss she worked on the Volkswagen diesel-emissions class action, in discovery and in overseeing the claims process for the consumer settlement, and sat on the plaintiffs’ steering and science committees in the federal litigation over Invokana, a Janssen diabetes drug. Seeger brought her onto the trial team in the federal testosterone-replacement litigation, “my first real mass tort trial experience,” she has said; there she helped prepare a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration to testify in two trials. He also invited her to argue before the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation. She was made a partner at the start of 2019. “I’ve been able to step up to these opportunities because of the work I’ve put in and the years of experience I’ve had,” she said in 2021, “but that door needed to be open for me to step through it.”

The First Vision-Loss Docket

Aminolroaya had held the role before, in litigation over a bladder drug. In 2018 Nieraj Jain of Emory Eye Center in Atlanta reported six patients with unusual changes in the macula, the central part of the retina. All six had taken Elmiron, pentosan polysulfate sodium, for about fifteen years. Elmiron was the only drug the FDA had approved for interstitial cystitis, a urinary condition that affects as many as a million people in the United States, most of them women. The next year Robin Vora, Amar Patel, and Ronald Melles searched Kaiser Permanente’s population of 4.3 million patients, found 140 who had taken the drug, and examined 91. Twenty-two showed clear signs of toxicity, and the rate rose with the dose, from 11 percent of patients who had taken 500 to 1,000 grams to 42 percent of those who had taken 1,500 grams or more. “And year after year, the number of pills they’re taking goes up and up,” Vora said. Pigmentary maculopathy, the damage they described, is often mistaken for age-related macular degeneration until testing ties it to the drug. On June 16, 2020, the FDA approved a new warning on Elmiron’s label, headed Retinal Pigmentary Changes.

The lawsuits that followed accused Elmiron’s manufacturer, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a Johnson & Johnson company, of failing to warn that long-term use could cause pigmentary maculopathy. On December 15, 2020, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent the federal cases, about a hundred of them, to Judge Brian R. Martinotti in the District of New Jersey, finding that they shared factual questions about the drug’s propensity to cause retinal injuries and would likely involve complex scientific and regulatory issues. On January 22, 2021, the District of New Jersey appointed Aminolroaya, Virginia E. Anello, and Paul Pennock co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs. The order directed them to “Initiate, coordinate, and conduct all pretrial discovery on behalf of all Plaintiffs,” to answer the defense’s motions, and to pursue settlement. Eighteen of the twenty-five lawyers the court named to the plaintiffs’ leadership were women, and Aminolroaya said she looked forward to being “part of a leadership team that reflects the people we’re representing: 18 out of 25 of us are women.”

Martinotti scheduled a virtual Science Day for September 30, 2021, at which the parties would take him through the science, with more than five hundred suits then pending. By the fall of 2022, 1,926 Elmiron cases had been filed and served, and the parties were preparing a bellwether trial, Maria Windham v. Janssen Pharmaceuticals, before Martinotti. Windham, a Louisiana woman, alleged that retinal pigmentary changes appeared about two years after she began taking the drug; the cases of Opal Faye Broussard and Julia Manning were expected to follow hers to trial in 2023. Expert discovery in Windham had closed, briefing on the admissibility of the experts’ opinions began on September 27, 2022, and on October 24 Martinotti moved the trial date from January 30, 2023 to March 27, 2023.

Through 2023 the lawyers resolved claims through settlements in place of the bellwether trials. In August 2023 Martinotti ordered two interest-bearing accounts opened at Esquire Bank—an Elmiron Fee Fund and an Elmiron Expense Fund, held subject to the court’s direction—to receive the money set aside to pay for the lawyers’ common work. In January 2024 the court-appointed resolution liaison counsel told him that a “substantial portion” of the cases had been resolved, and he called a settlement conference in Newark for February 23, 2024, at which designated plaintiffs’ lawyers were to appear in person with full authority to settle and their clients were to be available by telephone. Aminolroaya stayed with the litigation from her appointment into the settlement phase. More than five years after Aminolroaya’s appointment, Seeger Weiss is still accepting new Elmiron clients.

Three Questions for the Whole Docket

On August 2, 2023, Paul Pennock, one of Aminolroaya’s Elmiron co-leads, sued Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly in federal court in Louisiana for Jaclyn Bjorklund, 44, who had taken Ozempic for more than a year before switching to Mounjaro and who alleged vomiting so severe that her teeth fell out. Novo Nordisk responded that gastroparesis was a known risk for people with diabetes. In September 2023 the FDA updated Ozempic’s label to acknowledge reports of ileus, a blocked intestine, which the labels of Wegovy and Mounjaro already acknowledged. The next month Juanita Gantt’s husband found her on the floor.

On May 8, 2024, Judge Gene E.K. Pratter named Parvin Aminolroaya one of four co-lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the consolidated federal litigation, with Pennock, Sarah Ruane of Wagstaff & Cartmell, and Jonathan D. Orent of Motley Rice, and named an executive committee of ten lawyers with assignments in trial strategy, science, data, bellwether selection, and briefing. “The people we represent suffered serious injuries because of these medications,” the four co-leads said, medications they said the defendants had “aggressively marketed without properly disclosing dangerous gastrointestinal side effects or studying the impact of long-term use on patients’ health.” Pratter died nine days after signing the order, and by August the docket had passed to Marston.

In the summer of 2024, the consolidated federal case in Philadelphia over Novo Nordisk’s and Eli Lilly’s diabetes and weight-loss drugs held 842 lawsuits, a number the plaintiffs’ own lawyers expected to reach the thousands, with about 7,600 more cases under investigation, and the drugmakers asked the judge to decide first whether the injury most of those plaintiffs alleged could be reliably diagnosed without a test. Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly argued, and said their experts would attest, that a clinician could not reliably diagnose gastroparesis without objective testing such as a gastric emptying study performed when the symptoms first presented—and many of the plaintiffs claiming the condition had never alleged such a test. The plaintiffs answered that a gastric emptying study is not required and that their experts would describe other reliable ways of diagnosing it. The drugmakers asked the court to resolve that question, along with preemption and general causation, before the rest of the case went forward.

Marston agreed the question should be answered once, for the docket, rather than plaintiff by plaintiff. “Given the proportion of Plaintiffs alleging gastroparesis and the potential importance of that diagnosis to Plaintiffs’ failure to warn claims,” she wrote on August 23, 2024, “the Court finds this issue is cross cutting and an early decision on how to reliably diagnose that condition is appropriate.” The plaintiffs’ leadership counsel had told the court they expected more than ninety-five percent of the cases over Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Trulicity, and Mounjaro to allege that injury.

The drugmakers had proposed three cross-cutting issues: what proof of gastroparesis a plaintiff had to produce; whether federal law preempted the failure-to-warn claims, or the warnings in the FDA-approved labels were adequate as a matter of law; and whether the science supported the claim that GLP-1 drugs cause the injuries at all. Marston ordered early discovery and motions on the first two in August 2024 and, that October, with the parties’ agreement, added the third. Each was to be decided once, for the whole docket, before any case-specific discovery or the selection of cases for bellwether trials.

On January 24, 2025, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly also moved to dismiss twelve of the master complaint’s fourteen counts—warranty, fraud and misrepresentation, consumer protection, design defect, negligence, negligent undertaking—and the demand for medical monitoring, leaving the two failure-to-warn counts unchallenged. The plaintiffs alleged that the companies were on notice of “reasonable evidence of a causal association” between the drugs and the injuries, and that the labels nonetheless “omitted and continue to omit any ‘Warnings and Precautions’ concerning gastroparesis.” Marston heard argument on April 21, 2025 and ruled on August 15; the failure-to-warn claims and the warranty claims went forward.

The same day, Marston decided the first of the three cross-cutting questions, ruling on what proof of a gastroparesis diagnosis a plaintiff must show, and the litigation turned to the remaining two. The docket kept growing while the lawyers built the record for them—1,521 cases in March 2025, 2,809 that October, 3,928 by August 2026.

The Second Vision-Loss Docket

In the late summer of 2023, neuro-ophthalmologists at Mass Eye and Ear saw three patients diagnosed with vision loss from non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, NAION, within a single week, and all three were taking semaglutide, the drug sold as Ozempic and Wegovy. Joseph Rizzo, who directs the hospital’s neuro-ophthalmology service, and his colleagues went back through the records of more than 17,000 patients seen in the six years since Ozempic’s release. In JAMA Ophthalmology in July 2024 they reported that patients with diabetes who were prescribed semaglutide had more than four times the risk of a NAION diagnosis, and patients who were overweight or obese more than seven times the risk. NAION is a rare injury to the optic nerve that brings sudden and potentially permanent vision loss.

On June 6, 2025, the European Medicines Agency’s safety committee concluded that NAION is a “very rare” side effect of semaglutide, which may affect “up to 1 in 10,000 people,” and recommended that the product information be updated “to include NAION as a side effect”; if NAION is confirmed, it advised, “treatment with semaglutide should be stopped.” The World Health Organization issued its own alert three weeks later, and by September 2026 NAION had been added to the labels of certain GLP-1 drugs in Britain, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. A Novo Nordisk spokesperson said in September 2026: “A causal relationship between GLP-1RAs, including semaglutide, and NAION cannot be confirmed based on the totality of data.”

By late 2025 there were suits in federal courts in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Eli Lilly asked the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to fold them into the gastrointestinal docket; on December 15, 2025, the Panel declined, gathered twenty cases into a separate docket, and sent it to Marston, who already had the same defendants and largely the same lawyers before her. On February 23, 2026, Marston appointed Aminolroaya co-lead counsel in that second GLP-1 docket, this one built around a different injury entirely: In re: Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists (GLP-1 RAs) Non-Arteritic Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy Products Liability Litigation. The plaintiffs alleged that Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda, and Trulicity caused NAION, and that Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly had failed to warn them of the risk.

“We are honored by Judge Marston’s appointment and grateful for the trust placed in our team,” Aminolroaya said in a statement when Seeger Weiss announced the appointment on March 12, 2026. “The vision loss our clients have suffered from GLP-1 medications is devastating and permanent. We are committed to working with our co-counsel to hold Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly accountable for failing to warn patients of this serious risk.” Her two co-lead counsel in the vision-loss case, Jonathan D. Orent and Sarah Ruane, had been appointed alongside her in the gastrointestinal case in May 2024, and Maxwell Kelly of Seeger Weiss joined the plaintiffs’ executive committee. Marston directed the co-leads to report at every monthly conference on the “inventory of filed and unfiled cases” headed for the docket.

She set a Science Day for June 2, 2026, in Courtroom 16B, with the plaintiffs to present from nine to half past eleven in the morning and the defendants from one to half past three, on the eye and NAION, the drugs’ labeling and regulatory history, and the medical literature; individual plaintiffs and the companies’ marketing were off limits, and nothing said that day could later be used for impeachment. On July 2, 2026, the court entered a case management order in the new docket on early discovery and motions on cross-cutting issues, the course Marston had set for the gastroparesis claims two years earlier. This time there were two questions, general causation and whether federal law and the labels defeat the warning claims, and Marston wrote that they “affect every case in this MDL.” Of the 137 cases then pending, 19 named Lilly. By October 1, 2026, the vision-loss docket held 247 cases, with briefing on the two questions expected to run into 2027.

Five Days in September

In the gastrointestinal docket, the briefs on the two remaining questions were in by August 2026. On May 19, Diana M. Watral of Kirkland & Ellis had filed Eli Lilly’s roadmap to its motions. Lilly asked Marston to exclude the general-causation opinions of the plaintiffs’ gastroenterologists, among them David Metz, a retired gastroenterologist, and Joseph Pisegna; to exclude the warning opinions of Metz, of David Ross, a former FDA medical reviewer who concluded that Lilly should have added gallbladder disease to Trulicity’s warnings by December 2017, and of David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration; and to enter summary judgment. On preemption, Lilly argued that claims were preempted “where FDA considered and rejected additional gastroparesis warnings” and that there was “no newly acquired information to allow a unilateral label change.” Among the decisions it cited for the standard was Wyeth v. Levine, the case Aminolroaya had spent most of her job interview discussing in 2008.

Kessler served as commissioner under two administrations; he holds a medical degree from Harvard and a law degree from the University of Chicago and teaches at the University of California, San Francisco. His January 2, 2026 report concluded that Trulicity delays gastric emptying and that its label should have carried a warning about severe gastrointestinal adverse events; that Lilly should have added ileus, severe constipation with fecal impaction, and intestinal obstruction to the label’s adverse-reactions section no later than 2017; and that a 2022 safety analysis Lilly prepared for the FDA “reaches a flawed conclusion” about intestinal obstruction. When Eli Lilly moved to confine his testimony to the opinions disclosed in that report, Marston ruled on May 18, 2026 that the report gave sufficient notice of his opinions and denied the motion. On his opinion about the label’s warnings section, she wrote, “the Court cannot find that such an opinion is outside the scope of his report.”

The two questions that remained—whether the FDA-approved labels and federal law defeat the failure-to-warn claims as a matter of law, and whether the drugs cause the injuries at all—were set for a five-day evidentiary hearing on the parties’ Rule 702 motions to exclude expert opinions, in Courtroom 16B of the federal courthouse in Philadelphia, September 14 through September 18, 2026, three of the days scheduled to run until 5:30 in the evening and later if needed. Marston set the Monday session to begin at 9:30 in the morning and the Friday session at 8. The hearing went forward that week; experts for each side testified and were questioned by the other side’s lawyers. On September 1 the docket had held 4,022 cases.

By late September 2026 the court had posted no ruling. On October 8 Marston moved the October 13 status conference to 10:30 that morning in Courtroom 16B and directed the parties to deliver their closing arguments on the Rule 702 motions. No ruling had issued by the middle of October. Bellwether trials wait behind those decisions; only after Marston resolves the last two cross-cutting issues are the parties expected to pick the first cases to try, and the vision-loss plaintiffs face the same two questions next. More than four thousand cases are waiting on the answers Aminolroaya was appointed in May 2024 to help litigate for the plaintiffs: whether the labels the FDA approved were warning enough, and whether the science shows the drugs cause the injuries at all.