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In addition to Bard, the six other Sky Valley cases that yielded jury verdicts against Monsanto have been appealed. Monsanto has appellate briefs due in June and July in some of those cases and will likely continue detailing its stance on Erickson's unique impact on each verdict. Two of those cases have been fully briefed and are awaiting scheduling for oral arguments before the court.

PCBs' 'Useful Safe Life'

The Court of Appeals ruled the product liability claims in Erickson should have been tried under the Washington statute of repose, a finding that has implications for at least four other cases that yielded $430 million in verdicts for the plaintiffs.

The ruling does not eliminate the chance of future wins for the plaintiffs in those cases, but instead means the plaintiffs will have to overcome additional hurdles for a favorable outcome.

The Washington statute of repose for product liability establishes that a product seller cannot be held liable for harm caused after the expiration of a product's "useful safe life," which is presumed to be 12 years unless certain exceptions apply.

In Erickson and four other cases, the trial court denied Monsanto's use of Washington's statute of repose for product liability as a defense. While the plaintiffs in the five cases brought their claims under the Washington Product Liability Act, they convinced the trial court to apply law from Monsanto's home state of Missouri — which does not have such a time limit for defective product claims.

But the three-judge appellate panel in Erickson concluded that the Washington statute of repose is an integral part of the state's product liability law and thus shouldn't have been substituted with Missouri law. Now the trial court will need to determine the factual question of the PCBs' "useful safe life."

Monsanto argues that this finding warrants the reversal of the $430 million verdicts in those four cases, as well as the $82 million verdict in the sixth case to go to trial, Mullen-Deland v. Pharmacia LLC.

"Given that PCBs were last produced more than four decades ago and the presumption of useful safe life under Washington law is 12 years, the company believes that repose is a strong argument for its defense in any future trials or retrials," a Monsanto spokesperson told Law360.

But Jones, representing the Sky Valley plaintiffs, said that even if the Erickson ruling is not overturned, the statute of repose determination "is unlikely to result in a complete reversal" of other victories because "the repose issue can be retried without affecting those verdicts."