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.
