Discovery in Hair Relaxer Cancer Lawsuits To Continue Through Most of 2025

While lawyers are still debating plans to prepare a small group of bellwether hair relaxer cancer lawsuits for case-specific discovery, the U.S. District Judge presiding over the litigation has given the parties until late 2025 to finish all general fact discovery, suggesting the first cases will not go before a jury until 2026 or later.

There are currently about 8,400 product liability lawsuits pending in the federal court system, each raising similar allegations that the manufacturers of popular products like Dark & Lovely, Just for Me and other chemical hair straighteners failed to warn women about the risk that the relaxers may cause uterine cancer, endometrial cancer, ovarian cancer and other injuries.

The litigation emerged in late 2022, following the publication of a study that highlighted a link between use of hair relaxers and uterine cancer, finding that women who regularly used the products face a 156% increased risk compared to women who did not use hair relaxers.

As more women discover that the hair relaxers may have caused their diagnosis, the size and scope of the litigation has continued to expand as lawyers move forward with discovery into common issues that impact all claims.

To help manage the large numbers of related claims, the litigation has been centralized in the Northern District of Illinois before U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland since February 2023, as part of a hair relaxer injury lawsuit MDL, or multidistrict litigation.

In November 2023, Judge Rowland ordered the parties to propose competing hair relaxer lawsuit bellwether trial plans, outlining a process for selecting a group of representative cases to go through case-specific discovery in preparation for early trial dates. However, the parties have been unable to agree on several key points regarding the selection of representative claims, as well as when the bellwether process should get underway.

Earlier this month, the parties met with Judge Rowland for a status conference, to update the Court on progress in the litigation and ongoing general discovery efforts.

On October 11, a Notification of Docket Entry (PDF) was issued by Judge Rowland, directing the parties to complete written discovery by February 28, 2025, with oral fact discovery to be completed by September 30, 2025.

The Judge also gave defendants until November 12, 2024, to issue an answer to a hair relaxer lawsuit consolidated class action complaint, an amalgam of several almost identical class actions filed by various plaintiffs who suffered no physical injuries, but seek refunds and medical monitoring expenses.

Once the court establishes a bellwether process, the parties will shift focus to conducting case-specific discovery on a smaller group of representative claims, which involve allegations that will be repeated throughout the litigation.

While the outcome of any early test trials held for these bellwether cases will not have any binding impact on other claims in the MDL, the average hair relaxer lawsuit payouts awarded by juries is expected to have a substantial impact on what the manufacturers may be required to pay to avoid the need for thousands of individual cases to go before juries in the future.

Following coordinated discovery in the MDL and any early bellwether trials, if the parties fail to negotiate hair relaxer settlements for individuals diagnosed with uterine cancer, endometrial cancer, ovarian cancer and other complications, Judge Rowland may later remand each individual lawsuit directly filed in the MDL back to the U.S. District Court where it would have originated for a separate trial.