Tracy A. Finken

Kathleen Fazio began receiving Depo-Provera, Pfizer’s injectable contraceptive, around 1999 and was still using it in 2018. In December 2017 she was diagnosed with an intracranial meningioma, a tumor of the lining of the brain, and in January 2018 she underwent a craniotomy.

Six years later, on March 27, 2024, The BMJ published a study from EPI-PHARE, the drug-safety research group run jointly by France’s medicines agency and its national health-insurance fund. Working from the French national health data system, Noémie Roland and her coauthors identified 18,061 women who had undergone surgery for an intracranial meningioma between 2009 and 2018 and matched them against 90,305 women of the same birth years and areas of residence who had not, five for each case, 108,366 women in all. Women who had used injectable medroxyprogesterone acetate, the active ingredient in Depo-Provera, faced meningioma odds 5.55 times higher than women who had not, an excess driven, the authors found, by prolonged use of a year or longer. Progesterone, dydrogesterone and the levonorgestrel intrauterine system showed no excess risk. In the United States, a December 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had estimated that nearly a quarter of sexually experienced women surveyed from 2015 to 2019 had used Depo-Provera at some point.

Seven months after the study appeared, on October 28, 2024, Anapol Weiss sued Pfizer, Pharmacia & Upjohn, Viatris, Greenstone, and Prasco Labs in the Central District of California on behalf of Fazio, then fifty-six and living in California, alleging that her long-term use of the injection caused her tumor and that the companies had failed to warn of the risk. The suit, brought by Tracy A. Finken’s team at the Philadelphia firm, was one of the first against Pfizer over the drug. “Our client’s life has been forever altered,” Finken said, “and we will fight to ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.”

Twenty-Eight Cases in Eight Districts

By December 10, 2024, the firm had filed two more Depo-Provera cases in California, for LaTosha White and Rachel Valera Arceo, against Pfizer and its affiliates, and on that date it petitioned the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to pull together twenty-eight cases then pending in eight federal districts, proposing the Central District of California as the transferee court. “This litigation involves critical women’s health issues,” Finken said of the petition, “and centralization will allow for a streamlined process to achieve justice for those harmed.” A second group of nine plaintiffs, Kristina Schmidt among them, asked for the Northern District of California. Pfizer and its two Pharmacia affiliates wanted the Southern District of New York or, failing that, “a judge in the eastern United States with experience deciding important threshold motions in a large mass tort MDL.” Greenstone and Viatris opposed any court in California.

By the end of January 2025, the firm had filed suit for six more women, describing brain surgery, seizures, and cognitive and vision impairment among the nine. “Pfizer had a duty to warn patients and the medical community about the risks associated with Depo-Provera,” Finken said. “Instead, they failed to act, leaving thousands of women at risk of developing life-altering brain tumors.”

The Panel took up both motions on January 30, 2025, in Ceremonial Courtroom 13-3 of the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. United States Courthouse in Miami. Its notice for the session allowed no more than twenty minutes of argument on a matter, barring exceptional circumstances, divided among the sides, with the moving party usually heard first. Anapol Weiss named two of its shareholders, Thomas Anapol and Finken, to speak for its clients.

On February 7, 2025, the Panel sent the litigation to Pensacola instead, before Judge M. Casey Rodgers, finding the Northern District of Florida an appropriate transferee district with two related actions already pending there. The Panel called Rodgers “an able jurist with extensive and exceptional experience presiding over large products liability MDLs.” Among the questions it found common to the twenty-seven actions still pending were “whether Depo-Provera causes meningioma” and “whether defendants knew of the alleged risk of meningioma,” along with the plaintiffs’ claim that the companies had failed to promote a safer alternative, Depo-SubQ Provera 104.

Five Pilot Cases and Seventy-Five Applicants

Sixteen days after the transfer, on February 23, 2025, Rodgers chose five pilot cases to proceed through discovery and trial: those of Donna Toney, Alicia Wilson, Kristina Schmidt, and Allison Blonski, and the case Rachel Valera Arceo had brought with Fredi Valera Arceo through Anapol Weiss in Northern California. “The work of the MDL will be accomplished through the Pilot cases,” she wrote. “Common issues and defenses will be identified and ruled on early.” She put preemption and general causation, the defenses common to every claim, on separate discovery tracks, preferring no more than 120 days for the first and 180 for the second.

In the same order Rodgers said she wanted a “balanced leadership team that reflects diversity of all types.” Pretrial Order No. 5, entered three weeks after the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation created the docket, called for written applications due March 7 and oral presentations before the judge on March 13 and, if needed, March 14, 2025. Pretrial Order No. 8 then listed seventy-five applicants by number; Finken was fourth. A lawyer who chose not to present had to tell Courtroom Deputy Barbara Rogers by noon on March 12, or the application was withdrawn. Each of the others had five minutes in Pensacola, on the record, beginning shortly after the March 13 case management conference and running without a lunch break, with the rest heard from 8:00 a.m. the next morning. Rodgers told them she already knew their qualifications, skills and experience from the papers, and asked each to address the one attribute, characteristic or qualification the lawyer felt was most important for the court to consider.

On March 16, 2025, in Pretrial Order No. 18, Rodgers wrote that she had been “thoroughly impressed with the quality of the applicant pool” and had chosen the team “with difficulty.” She named Finken and Virginia Buchanan co-chairs of the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee for a one-year term, charging the committee with coordinating and overseeing the work of plaintiffs’ counsel through the consolidated pretrial proceedings, settling the plaintiffs’ positions on pretrial matters, and coordinating the selection of cases for common-issue and pilot discovery and trials. For the defendants, the order seated Joseph Petrosinelli of Williams & Connolly on the settlement committee and his colleague Jessica Bodger Rydstrom as state-federal liaison.

Records Made at or Near the Time

Before any case could move forward, Rodgers required its plaintiff to clear a threshold, which she set in Pretrial Order No. 17 on March 14, 2025, and enforced through Pretrial Order No. 22 that May: a Use/Injury Questionnaire supported by a prescription, pharmacy, medical, or insurance record created at or near the time of the injections—or by a sworn declaration from a healthcare provider or pharmacist—plus a diagnosis shown in a medical or insurance record or a provider’s sworn declaration rather than only in the patient’s own reported history. Pretrial Order No. 22 lists twenty-three qualifying meningioma diagnoses and gives a claimant ten business days to fix a deficiency once the court-appointed Data Administrator, BrownGreer, flags one. A case that still falls short, the order warns, may be “dismissed with prejudice for a willful failure to comply with orders and deadlines of the Court.”

The docket grew fast. On October 23, 2025, it held 1,446 cases, brought through 99 law firms whose work the Executive Committee was charged with coordinating. By January 23, 2026, there were 2,372 actions and 2,598 plaintiffs; by March 6, 3,467 actions and 3,790 plaintiffs, with new filings arriving at about 650 a month. In September 2025 Pretrial Order No. 22A added a process for claimed exceptions to the proof rules, and by early March 2026 BrownGreer reported 94 percent of complaints complete with no deficiencies. Rodgers had held two show-cause hearings on claimed exceptions; in each the plaintiff established good cause and the order was discharged.

Two Letters From the FDA

Pfizer’s defense rests on federal preemption: the argument that FDA approval of Depo-Provera’s label forecloses a state-law claim that the warning was inadequate. Pfizer’s version turned on an exchange with the agency. The company says it learned of the meningioma risk in 2023, and in February 2024 it applied to add a warning to the label. The FDA said no, writing that “the findings of the available observational studies alone do not support the addition of a warning.” Pfizer argued that the refusal made the warning impossible under federal law and so barred the failure-to-warn claims; in court it described the FDA’s rejection letter as carrying “the force of law.”

The plaintiffs’ leadership answered on the science and on the label. Virginia Buchanan, Finken’s co-chair, and liaison counsel Christopher Paulos wrote in mid-2025 that the epidemiology showed an increased risk of meningioma, a dose-response relationship tied to how long a woman stayed on the drug, and a plausible biological explanation involving progesterone receptors. Ellen Relkin, one of the co-lead counsel, said that a manufacturer can strengthen a warning without waiting for the FDA’s approval, through the agency’s Changes Being Effected procedure, and called Pfizer’s 2024 submission “a half-hearted, half-baked request to the FDA, hoping that it’s denied.” Other regulators had already acted. Health Canada’s label noted rare reports of meningioma with long-term use, and the European Medicines Agency’s 2022 guidance told prescribers that patients “should be monitored for clinical signs and symptoms of meningioma.”

Pfizer moved for summary judgment on August 22, 2025, on the master docket and in all five pilot cases, Rachel Valera Arceo’s among them, and Rodgers heard argument on September 29. The transcript runs 113 pages, with large portions redacted. At the October 24 case management conference she said she would hold her ruling until the FDA decided a revised label submission Pfizer had made in June 2025, and would then order both sides to brief the question again.

The FDA decided on December 12, 2025. In a letter of that date it approved adding a meningioma warning to the American labels of Depo-Provera and Depo-SubQ Provera 104. The new label tells prescribers that meningiomas have been reported after repeated injections, mostly with long-term use, that patients should be watched for signs of one, and that the drug should be stopped if a meningioma is diagnosed. Pfizer said the update reflected a decision by the FDA to approve a warning “which the agency had earlier denied.” Lawyers leading the plaintiffs’ case said Pfizer had misled doctors, patients, and the FDA about the link for years.

Rodgers ordered the supplemental briefing she had promised. Pfizer filed on January 30, 2026, plaintiffs’ leadership answered on February 20, and Pfizer replied on February 27; by March 7 the motion was fully briefed and under review. In a January 27 order she directed that her rulings on preemption and general causation would be entered on the master docket and would apply to every case in it. The plaintiffs had served their general-causation expert disclosures on January 1, general-causation expert depositions ran from February 28 to March 20, and Donna Toney’s case was set to be tried first, in December 2026, with the other four pilot cases to follow beginning in January 2027.

Two Pages for a Second Term

Appointments in Pensacola ran a year at a time. In January 2026 Pretrial Order No. 29 required each leadership lawyer seeking another term to send the judge, by 5:00 p.m. on February 13, an account of no more than two pages describing “the nature and scope of counsel’s work over the past year,” for her review in camera; a lawyer who missed the deadline would not be reappointed.

On March 20, 2026, Judge Rodgers signed the order that kept Tracy A. Finken among the lawyers coordinating the plaintiffs’ side of that docket. Pretrial Order No. 31 reappointed Finken and Virginia Buchanan as co-chairs of the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee—seven lawyers seated beneath three lead counsel and a liaison counsel, and alongside a ten-member steering committee—for a term running to March 20, 2027. It was Finken’s second term in the post. Christopher Seeger is lead counsel, with Bryan Aylstock and Ellen Relkin as co-leads and Christopher Paulos as liaison counsel. In a footnote, Rodgers wrote, “The leadership work thus far has been exemplary,” and added that the court appreciated the efforts of every lawyer who had reapplied.

Registration Through November 30, 2026

On June 15, 2026, with the ruling still pending, Rodgers postponed decision on Pfizer’s summary-judgment motion. Plaintiffs’ lead counsel and Pfizer, Pharmacia, and Pharmacia & Upjohn had reached what her order called a “global agreement” giving eligible plaintiffs the chance to resolve their claims, and the same day plaintiffs’ leadership counsel announced a settlement of a majority of the claims in the MDL and in New York state court. Because the agreement would not end every case, Rodgers kept the general-causation hearing on her calendar and moved it to Pensacola, no longer a joint hearing with the Delaware court.

The Master Settlement Agreement was signed on July 21, 2026, and its terms are confidential. The parties estimated that about eighty percent of the plaintiffs in the MDL would be eligible, and the court’s later rulings on the remaining legal issues will not change who is. Because the MDL is not a class action, Rodgers wrote, the court did not have to decide whether the settlement was fair; she approved an administrative docket on which no filing fee is due unless a plaintiff found ineligible chooses to keep litigating. By July 27 the docket held 6,289 cases, each brought by a woman who says she received the injectable contraceptive and was later diagnosed with a meningioma, and the five original pilot plaintiffs, now eligible to settle, were replaced by three others: Christina Yeager, Vivian Davis, and Katherine Allison Ponder. Rachel Valera Arceo’s case, a pilot since February 2025, was among the five replaced.

On August 5, Judge Rodgers appointed BrownGreer settlement administrator; registration runs to November 30, 2026, with payments projected to begin in the first quarter of 2027. On September 4 she made three more appointments: a qualified settlement fund administrator, a lien resolution master, and Matt Garretson of Garretson, LLC as allocation master for a supplemental compensation fund, from which an eligible claimant may seek additional compensation. Garretson writes the criteria for those petitions, applies them to each petitioner’s facts, decides whether to grant an additional award and in what amount, and reports to the court on the program’s progress. Plaintiffs who do not take part, or whose cases are ineligible, continue under a separate case management order, with the preemption and general-causation motions still to be decided for them.

Sixty-Two Applicants by Videoconference

Finken had sat on court-appointed committees before Pensacola. On February 24, 2020, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg named her to the Initial Census Team in the Zantac (ranitidine) litigation in the Southern District of Florida—one of two four-lawyer teams appointed at the MDL’s outset—alongside Michael McGlamry, Daniel Nigh, and Adam Pulaski. The plaintiffs alleged that ranitidine contained NDMA, N-nitrosodimethylamine, a probable carcinogen. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Rosenberg interviewed sixty-two applicants for leadership positions by videoconference on May 6 and 7, 2020. She wrote that she wanted a team combining “wisdom and judgment” with “new approaches and ideas,” and noted that fewer than a third of the applicants were women.

The next day, in Pretrial Order No. 20, she named Finken one of four Co-Lead Counsel for the plaintiffs, with Robert C. Gilbert, McGlamry, and Pulaski, responsible for presenting the plaintiffs’ positions to the court and coordinating the pretrial proceedings conducted by counsel for the individual plaintiffs, and, subject to the court’s approval, for conducting settlement negotiations. “It is truly an honor to be selected to serve in this leadership role among several of my peers,” Finken said, noting that “women comprise over 50% of the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee.”

Finken has also sat on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the consolidated proton-pump-inhibitor litigation before Judge Claire Cecchi, assigned to the District of New Jersey in August 2017, in which people who took drugs including Nexium and Prilosec alleged acute and chronic kidney injuries. By August 2023 that docket held about 12,500 cases. That October AstraZeneca agreed to pay $425 million to settle about 11,000 of them and took a $425 million charge for the Nexium and Prilosec litigation in its third-quarter results; GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Procter & Gamble settled the claims over their own products for a combined $108.5 million.

She has sat on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the Tepezza marketing and products-liability litigation before Judge Thomas M. Durkin in the Northern District of Illinois, which the Panel created on June 2, 2023, for claims that Horizon Therapeutics’ drug for thyroid eye disease caused “severe or permanent hearing loss and tinnitus,” and on the Plaintiffs’ Science Committee in the litigation over Juul Labs’ marketing and products.

Bloomsburg, Widener, Saucon Valley

Finken studied history, with a minor in English, at Bloomsburg University, graduating in 1993, and graduated cum laude from Widener University School of Law in 1998, a member of its moot court and trial advocacy honor societies and the recipient of its Most Promising Civil Litigator and Outstanding Student Service awards. By 2020 she had been with Anapol Weiss for more than twenty years; she is a shareholder in its Philadelphia office and is admitted in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. She belongs to the National Order of Barristers and has served as an arbitrator in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas arbitration program. In The Legal Intelligencer she wrote in 2009 about the recusal petitions the Supreme Court’s Caperton ruling might invite, and in 2015 under the headline “FDA Poised to Enact Rule That Will Advance Consumer Safety.”

She is a school director of the Saucon Valley School District and sits on the board of the Saucon Valley Foundation for Educational Innovation. She lives in Saucon Valley, Pennsylvania, with her husband and four sons.

Four Attorneys, Bergen County

On June 9, 2026, Judge Gregg A. Padovano of the Superior Court of New Jersey in Bergen County named Finken one of four attorneys on the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee in the state’s consolidated litigation over GLP-1 receptor agonists, which the New Jersey Supreme Court had designated a multicounty litigation on October 16, 2025. The Supreme Court split the GLP-1 claims into two separate multicounty litigations, one for gastrointestinal injuries and one for vision loss, and sent both to Padovano; the products named include Ozempic, Wegovy, Rybelsus, Trulicity, Mounjaro, and Zepbound. Finken’s fellow appointees are Matt Morrison, Shannon Pennock, and David Rosenband, working under lead counsel Adam Slater and Ellen Relkin, who also co-leads the Depo-Provera litigation in Pensacola.

The plaintiffs allege that the drugs are associated with serious vision injuries, including non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, a sudden and potentially permanent loss of sight. “Patients who developed serious vision loss after taking a GLP-1 medication deserve answers, and they deserve strong representation,” Finken said.