Tara D. Sutton

Minnesota Tobacco Litigation

Tara Sutton entered Minnesota’s tobacco case as the only associate in the courtroom well. Twenty-five years later, she returned as lead trial counsel against JUUL.

A central discovery dispute concerned approximately thirty thousand pages of internal research withheld under claims of attorney-client privilege.

For years, Minnesota’s trial team had argued that cigarette manufacturers were using attorney-client privilege to conceal scientific research about addiction and disease. Outside law firms directed studies, received the results, and labeled the material legal work. The arrangement turned lawyers into a wall between the public and the companies’ own knowledge.

Tara Sutton was a young associate when the fight began. She had joined Robins Kaplan after law school and, in her second year, entered a case that consumed the next four years of her life. The original team was smaller than its opponent expected: two partners and Sutton. She worked more than three thousand hours a year, learned the entire record, and made herself indispensable to the decisions that would shape trial.

The privilege battle climbed through the courts and reached the United States Supreme Court while the trial was underway. Minnesota prevailed. The companies produced roughly thirty thousand pages of previously withheld material. The documents reached backward before the 1964 Surgeon General’s report and showed what industry scientists understood about nicotine, addiction, and cancer while public denials continued.

Sutton later called it a mic-drop moment. She was the only associate seated in the courtroom well on either side. The evidence she had spent years pursuing had crossed the bar and entered public view.

A Career Chosen Early

Sutton’s decision to become a lawyer had been waiting for her since sixth grade. Her class wrote down what each student hoped to become and sealed the answers in envelopes to be opened at high-school graduation. Years later, Sutton unfolded hers and found the same ambition she had carried forward: lawyer.

She loved reading, writing, argument, and winning. The profession’s exact work was still hazy, but the direction never changed. She graduated with high honors from the University of Iowa and earned her law degree there with honors in 1992. Robins Kaplan first encountered her as a summer associate; she stayed for her career.

The tobacco case placed Sutton in a small trial team confronting industrywide questions of addiction, injury, and corporate knowledge. Her command of witnesses, documents, motions, and strategy earned her a central role in the litigation.

Sutton describes trial as a period when the case occupies the day and decisions arrive too quickly for prolonged hesitation. Years of preparation make those decisions possible.

Four Months in 1998

Minnesota and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota had sued the tobacco industry for healthcare costs and a course of marketing, concealment, and corporate conduct reaching across decades. Trial began in January 1998 and continued for roughly four months. Witnesses and exhibits converted the industry’s internal history into testimony before a Minnesota jury.

The thirty thousand pages altered more than the proof in one courtroom. Once disclosed, the records became available to researchers, regulators, journalists, and later litigants. They established a permanent archive of what the cigarette companies and their advisers had said when they believed the conversation would remain private.

After the parties rested, and hours before the jury was expected to begin deliberations, the case settled. The cigarette companies agreed to pay Minnesota and Blue Cross more than $6.6 billion. The agreement also imposed marketing restrictions and opened millions of internal documents to public review.

The settlement changed tobacco advertising across Minnesota: billboards came down, convenience-store displays contracted, and magazine promotion stopped. The payments funded public work, and the companies’ internal records remained available to researchers, journalists, regulators, and future litigants.

Minnesota v. JUUL

Twenty-five years later, Sutton stood before another Minnesota jury in a case about nicotine and young people. The product had changed from a cigarette to a slim electronic device. The marketing had moved from billboards and magazines to flavors, influencers, lifestyle imagery, and social-media feeds. The speed of adoption was different too. JUUL entered Minnesota in 2017; the State filed suit in 2019.

Sutton was now chair of Robins Kaplan’s National Mass Tort Group and lead trial counsel for Minnesota. Attorney General Keith Ellison shared the opening statement with her when trial began on March 28, 2023. The State called eleven witnesses over three weeks to address JUUL’s launch campaign, nicotine delivery, youth appeal, internal communications, and Altria’s $12.8 billion investment.

Minnesota rested on April 11. Six days later, before closing arguments, the parties reached a binding settlement. JUUL and Altria agreed to pay $60.5 million over eight years, fund costs and fees separately, make litigation materials available in public archives, and accept a detailed consent judgment governing marketing and sales.

The restrictions followed the new advertising environment. They addressed social media, influencers, models under thirty-five, entertainment promotion, flavored products, online sales, samples, sponsorships, and in-store practices. Minnesota directed its public recovery toward preventing youth smoking, vaping, and nicotine addiction.

Sutton would have enjoyed taking the case to verdict. Trial is where she feels most completely engaged. Her client, however, was the State, and the settlement secured money, disclosure, and forward-looking limits without waiting for another generation of evidence. The tobacco case had taken decades of injury before trial. Minnesota reached JUUL while the market was still young.

The First Mirapex Bellwether

Mass torts also reach injuries that appear, at first, to belong entirely to one person. Gary Charbonneau began taking Mirapex for Parkinson’s disease in 1997. Years later, he developed a gambling compulsion that consumed substantial personal savings. The medication was a dopamine agonist. The legal question was whether its manufacturers had adequately warned physicians and patients about reports connecting the drug to compulsive behavior.

Sutton led the first Mirapex bellwether trial in federal court in Minnesota. Sutton asked jurors to examine whether Charbonneau’s gambling compulsion reflected the drug’s effects rather than a character flaw. The team presented his dose history, label changes, adverse-event reports, medical literature, physician decisions, and the chronology of his behavior.

On July 30, 2008, the jury returned an $8,279,300 verdict, including $7.8 million in punitive damages. The award compensated Charbonneau’s losses and found the warning failure sufficiently serious to justify punishment.

The bellwether produced a public trial record for issues shared across the related cases, and Robins Kaplan later resolved more than 280 Mirapex claims on confidential terms.

Sutton also led expert-admissibility work in Mirapex and later litigation involving Chantix, Abilify, Benicar, and JUUL. Those proceedings required courts to evaluate epidemiology, pharmacology, labeling, clinical records, and the reliability of proposed causation testimony.

Tribal Opioid Settlements

Tribal Nations were not parties to the Minnesota tobacco case or the national tobacco settlement structure, and their governments received no separate recovery for the public-health costs borne in Indian Country.

When the opioid crisis reached the Tribes represented by Robins Kaplan, Sutton viewed that exclusion as a mistake that should not be repeated. Tribal governments had their own healthcare systems, child-welfare responsibilities, public-safety costs, recovery programs, and sovereign authority. Folding them into state or county allocations would erase the institutions carrying those losses.

Sutton represented twenty-eight Tribal Nations and joined negotiations that created direct settlement paths for all 574 federally recognized Tribes. Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $150 million. The three largest distributors agreed to pay up to $515 million, with later agreements increasing the aggregate Tribal opioid settlements to approximately $1.5 billion.

The settlements sent money directly to Tribal governments, which could choose culturally appropriate treatment, prevention, and healing programs. National rules governed participation, releases, and allocation, but each Tribe decided how to use its share.

Sutton had spent the tobacco years learning how public-health litigation could turn corporate evidence into public resources. In the opioid negotiations, she helped ensure that those resources traveled directly to governments once left outside the room.

Stryker Hip-Implant Resolution

The Stryker Rejuvenate and ABG II hip litigation presented a different problem of scale. The modular systems used separate neck and stem components so surgeons could tailor an implant to a patient. Fretting and corrosion at the junction could release metal debris, damage tissue, and lead to painful revision surgery. Stryker recalled the products in 2012.

New Jersey centralized the state cases. Sutton represented claimants and became one of four plaintiffs’ lawyers appointed to negotiate a broader resolution. For the Stryker settlement, Sutton helped design a program that applied common rules while accounting for each patient’s different injuries.

The resulting program established a gross base award of $300,000 for a qualifying failed implant, with additions for infection, dislocation, nerve injury, lost wages, repeated surgery, and other complications. It also created a path for patients whose medical condition made revision surgery too dangerous. The program had no overall cap and was expected to exceed $1 billion.

Approximately ninety-five percent of registered eligible patients enrolled. The program used defined eligibility standards, documented enhancements and reductions, and centralized administration to resolve thousands of individual claims.

Direct Advocacy

Sutton describes her professional style as direct and transparent. She presents case strengths and vulnerabilities plainly, an approach that supports credibility in both trial and settlement negotiations.

Her practice combines rapid trial decision-making with the patient design of mass-resolution programs. Preparation supports both: detailed command of the trial record and detailed command of the claimant population.

She has held leadership roles in pharmaceutical and medical-device proceedings and serves on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in federal Depo-Provera litigation, where common work includes product use, medical injury, causation, warnings, and coordinated case management.