In the home state of the American seed company Monsanto, a particularly important hearing for the German Bayer group was scheduled for Monday: in the Missouri Circuit Court it is about the final approval for a multi-billion dollar collective settlement with which the Leverkusen-based group wants to get rid of the legal risk that Bayer brought into its portfolio with the Monsanto takeover.
A decision will only be made later; the court will first listen to the arguments of Monsanto and the plaintiffs and collect objections to the settlement that the company negotiated with leading plaintiffs' law firms in February. With this, Bayer wants to settle the 67,000 lawsuits still pending as well as possible future proceedings.
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Bayer set aside up to 7.25 billion euros for this, after the company had already paid more than ten billion dollars in an earlier settlement. The plaintiffs had until the beginning of June to enter into the settlement. The lawsuits allege non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL), a cancer variant that plaintiffs attribute to previously using the weedkiller Roundup, which contains glyphosate.
Tailwind from positive Supreme Court ruling
Bayer CEO Bill Anderson had announced several times that he would “significantly curb” the legal risks surrounding glyphosate this year. The company has actually made good progress; analysts describe the approval of the negotiated settlement as the last “liberation” it needed. Bayer recently received a boost from a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that was positive for the company.
By a vote of seven to two, the Supreme Court ruled in June that federal law precludes lawsuits at the state level alleging missing warnings on Roundup.
Bayer had always argued that it should not print warnings on its product when the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had clearly established its safety. The EPA is one of numerous agencies around the world that have approved glyphosate.
Bayer was nevertheless sued tens of thousands of times because of the alleged carcinogenic effects of its weed killer. The lawsuits are based on an investigation by a research agency at the World Health Organization (WHO). They classified the active ingredient glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” a decade ago.
The Supreme Court's decision has now removed the basis for all lawsuits alleging missing warnings. “The plaintiffs have not yet provided sufficient evidence for claims that go beyond allegedly inadequate warnings,” Bayer announced on Monday.
In order to prevent another wave of lawsuits, the settlement proposal has fixed rules. The entire process is to be stretched over 21 years. During this time, all potential plaintiffs must go through the settlement process before they can go to court. It can take time to review claims, which poses a hurdle for plaintiffs.
Bayer wants to exclude punitive damages
From the point of view of some lawyers, another rule is unattractive: Bayer wants to use the settlement to exclude punitive damages that are possible in the USA in the future. This special regulation of the American legal system has hit Bayer hard in the past: in many judgments, the company was not only sentenced to pay damages, but also to surcharges that required “malicious behavior” - sometimes costing Bayer billions.
Shortly after completing the $63 billion takeover of Monsanto in 2018, the largest acquisition in German economic history at the time, Bayer lost its first lawsuit surrounding glyphosate. Although the DAX group's share price has reversed its trend since the beginning of 2025 and has more than doubled since then, a share today still only costs almost half what it did back then.
