Kline & Specter Wins $2.25 Billion Roundup Cancer Verdict
After trial: The trial judge cut the verdict by more than 80 percent, to $400 million ($50 million compensatory and $350 million punitive). The plaintiff appealed the reduction and Monsanto appealed the liability finding.
Won by Kline & Specter, PC.
A Philadelphia jury found that Monsanto failed to warn that Roundup could cause cancer and awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion. The trial judge later reduced the award to $400 million.
What happened
For about two decades, John McKivison used Roundup to kill weeds. He sprayed the glyphosate-based weedkiller at a warehouse job in his 20s and later treated his own property in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, sometimes spreading 25 to 30 gallons at a time across land as large as two acres. In 2020, doctors diagnosed the former landscaper, then in his late 40s, with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the blood.
Kline & Specter took his case to trial in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, with Thomas R. Kline leading the plaintiff's team alongside co-counsel Jason Itkin of Arnold & Itkin. The central claim was failure to warn. The lawyers argued that Monsanto knew, or should have known, that glyphosate posed a cancer risk and sold Roundup for decades without telling users. Jurors heard that the company kept the product on shelves without a label tying it to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Monsanto denied that Roundup causes cancer and pointed to regulators, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that have not classified glyphosate as a human carcinogen. The plaintiff's side countered with the 2015 finding by the World Health Organization's cancer research arm that glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans.
On January 26, 2024, the jury found Monsanto liable and returned a unanimous verdict of $2.25 billion. The award split into $250 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages. It was the largest Roundup verdict to that point, ahead of a $1.5 billion award a Missouri jury had returned two months earlier. Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, had by then set aside roughly $16 billion to resolve more than 100,000 Roundup claims.
The full amount did not stand. In June 2024, Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas Judge Susan Schulman cut the verdict to $400 million, a reduction of more than 80 percent. She set compensatory damages at $50 million and punitive damages at $350 million, ruling the original figure excessive. Both sides said they would appeal, with Monsanto challenging the liability finding and McKivison's lawyers contesting the reduction. As reduced, the judgment for McKivison stood at $400 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Kline & Specter, PC
All Kline & Specter, PC proven verdicts →As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.
After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia in May 2015, killing eight and injuring more than 200, Kline & Specter's Thomas R. Kline led the plaintiffs' negotiations that produced a $265 million settlement fund for the victims.
A Philadelphia jury found the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania liable for the brain injury a newborn suffered when staff delayed a cesarean section, a $182.7 million verdict that grew to a molded judgment of about $207.6 million, the largest medical malpractice award in Pennsylvania history. Kline & Specter argued and won the appeal, where the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment in July 2025.
A Philadelphia jury awarded Ernest Caranci $175 million after finding that decades of Roundup use caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto failed to warn of the risk. Kline & Specter tried the case, the first Roundup trial in Philadelphia, and the verdict was later upheld on appeal.
Related product liability verdicts
Sullivan Papain was among the firms representing New York State against Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, and Lorillard, securing a $25 billion recovery through the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement.
C. Steven Yerrid, the youngest of Florida's 11-lawyer 'Dream Team,' added racketeering and conspiracy charges that tripled the damages ceiling, helping the state secure what was then the largest civil settlement in American history against the tobacco industry.
As co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation and the first firm to sue Monsanto in 2015, Weitz and Luxenberg helped negotiate a $10.9 billion settlement resolving approximately 125,000 non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims against Bayer-owned Monsanto.
After fifteen years of litigation and three failed bankruptcy maneuvers by Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, Ashcraft and Gerel attorneys R. Bryant McCulley and Michelle Parfitt helped negotiate a global, uncapped settlement of at least $5.5 billion covering approximately 76,000 ovarian-cancer claims.