Baby Powder Lawsuit Plaintiff Opposes MDL Request

A plaintiff in California who filed a personal talcum powder ovarian cancer lawsuit just over a week ago recently submitted a response opposing the motion to transfer federal claims into multidistrict litigation.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - A plaintiff who filed a Johnson & Johnson's baby powder ovarian cancer lawsuit on August 1 submitted her opposition to the motion to transfer the litigation's federal cases into multidistrict litigation on August 9. Mahnaz Khorrami, a woman who filed a talcum powder lawsuit in California against Johnson & Johnson claiming the company's negligence led to her ovarian cancer diagnosis, filed her opposition to the motion to transfer with a number of arguments backing her claim that the consolidation is unnecessary. Johnson & Johnson is currently facing hundreds of lawsuits nationwide claiming that the company put their consumers at a higher risk for ovarian cancer after failing to responsible warn them of the decades of medical research backing a correlation between talcum powder and an increased risk of ovarian cancer.

Khorrami claims that transferring the lawsuits already filed into multidistrict litigation will not assist the litigative process as most of the discovery pertaining to the claims has been achieved. One of the main benefits of multidistrict litigation is the pooling of resources from lawsuits filed nationwide so that discovery can happen in one central location and before a single judge to cut back on redundancies that can occur when thousands of individual lawsuits are progressing on their own. Khorrami and her talcum powder ovarian cancer attorneys claim that because this benefit will not be especially applicable to the Johnson & Johnson's baby powder ovarian cancer lawsuits, they do not support the motion to transfer the litigation into an MDL.

Khorrami also asserted that there are alternatives available to resolve the nationwide talcum powder cancer lawsuits that do not necessitate multidistrict litigation. Her response to the motion to transfer listed cross-notice depositions and allowances for the use of both past and future discovery in simultaneous actions as paths that could be taken by the parties involved to efficiently advance litigation without multidistrict litigation.

The third argument against consolidating the federal lawsuits into multidistrict litigation made by Khorrami and her talcum powder lawyers was that there were not enough claims filed in the federal courts to necessitate their consolidation. The initial motion to transfer only involved 11 federal Johnson & Johnson's baby powder lawsuits, and Khorrami claimed that this figure does not necessitate the transfer of those actions into multidistrict litigation. Her opposition to the motion to transfer claimed that the U.S. District Courts are not buckling under the sheer volume of talcum powder ovarian cancer lawsuits and thus transferring them to multidistrict litigation is unnecessary as the U.S. District Courts where the talcum powder cancer lawsuits are filed can handle them on their own.

The initial motion to transfer was filed by Tanashiska Lumas on July 15 before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. The document called for 11 federal cases to be consolidated before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, under the supervision of U.S. District Judge David R. Herndon. There are been a number of responses to the motion to transfer since it was filed, with both support and opposition to the proposal coming from fellow plaintiffs.

Information provided by TalcumPowderCancerLawsuit.com, a website devoted to providing news about talcum powder ovarian cancer lawsuits, as well as medical research and findings.