New Jersey Multicounty Litigation (MCL) for GLP-1 Lawsuits

Understanding New Jersey State Court GLP-1 Litigation for Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Related Drugs

The national GLP-1 drug litigation is not a single proceeding. It is a collection of legal actions unfolding simultaneously in federal courts and state courts, each governed by different procedural rules and presenting different strategic considerations for plaintiffs and defendants alike. While the federal multidistrict litigation in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania has received the most public attention, New Jersey state courts have quietly become one of the most important venues in the entire GLP-1 litigation landscape.

New Jersey has established coordinated state-court proceedings — known as multicounty litigation, or MCL — for GLP-1 injury claims involving both gastrointestinal injuries and vision loss. These proceedings operate in parallel with the federal MDL and are expected to play a significant role in shaping the overall trajectory of the litigation, including how manufacturers assess their settlement exposure and what damages ultimately become available to injured plaintiffs.

The New Jersey Supreme Court established two separate Multicounty Litigation (MCL) programs for state-court lawsuits involving GLP-1 medications
Ozempic®, Wegovy®, Mounjaro®, Zepbound™, The Ozempic pill® (FKA Rybelsus®), and Trulicity®
Two litigations centrally managed by Superior Court Judge Gregg A. Padovano.
Bergen County, NJ
Case Type ID: 643- Gastrointestinal Injuries MCL
Case Type ID: 644- NAION Vision Loss MCL
Defendants: Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly

What Is New Jersey Multicounty Litigation (MCL)?

Multicounty litigation is New Jersey’s state-court equivalent of the federal MDL process. When a large number of similar lawsuits are filed across multiple New Jersey counties, the state Supreme Court can designate the matter as an MCL and transfer all pending and future cases to a single judge in a single county for coordinated pretrial management. The goals of that coordination mirror those of the federal MDL system:

Improving efficiency by eliminating duplicative proceedings across different county courts
Ensuring consistent pretrial rulings across all cases in the litigation
Centralizing discovery so that depositions, expert witness development, and documentary evidence are managed once rather than repeated thousands of times

The critical distinction from a class action is that MCL does not merge individual lawsuits into a single collective case. Every plaintiff retains their own individual claim, their own attorney, and their own path to compensation. Coordination is a pretrial procedural mechanism — not a substantive merger of the underlying cases.

Why New Jersey Became a Major GLP-1 Litigation Venue

New Jersey’s emergence as a primary state-court venue for GLP-1 litigation is not coincidental. The state has a well-established reputation as a significant jurisdiction for pharmaceutical mass tort litigation, and several structural factors make it a natural forum for cases of this kind.

The most important of those factors is geography: Novo Nordisk maintains its U.S. headquarters in Plainsboro, New Jersey. That corporate presence gives plaintiffs a well-established basis for asserting jurisdiction in New Jersey state courts and provides a litigation rationale that courts in other states could not as readily accommodate. Beyond that threshold consideration, New Jersey brings several additional advantages to plaintiffs in complex pharmaceutical litigation:

The state has deep institutional experience managing large-scale mass tort proceedings, having previously hosted major litigations involving talc, opioids, pelvic mesh, Accutane, and Risperdal
New Jersey’s procedural rules and judicial infrastructure for coordinated litigation are well-developed and predictable
The Bergen County Superior Court, which is presiding over the GLP-1 MCL, is experienced in handling complex commercial and pharmaceutical litigation

That combination of corporate nexus, judicial infrastructure, and established mass tort precedent made New Jersey an obvious destination for plaintiffs’ counsel as GLP-1 filings began to accelerate.

The Two Litigation Tracks in New Jersey State Court

The New Jersey GLP-1 MCL is divided into two distinct tracks, each addressing a different category of alleged injury. The two tracks proceed in parallel under the same presiding judge but involve separate case management, separate expert development, and potentially different litigation timelines.

Track One: Gastrointestinal Injury MCL

In October 2025, the New Jersey Supreme Court formally designated multicounty litigation for GLP-1-related gastrointestinal injury claims. The designation consolidated all pending and future New Jersey state court cases involving GI injuries allegedly caused by GLP-1 medications under a single coordinated proceeding. (New Jersey Courts)

The gastrointestinal injury track covers a range of serious digestive complications that plaintiffs allege were caused or significantly worsened by their use of GLP-1 medications. The injuries at issue in this track include:

Gastroparesis — a condition in which the stomach’s ability to empty its contents is severely impaired, causing chronic nausea, vomiting of undigested food, and inability to eat normally
Bowel obstruction and ileus — intestinal blockages or functional failures of intestinal motility, sometimes requiring emergency surgery
Delayed gastric emptying and chronic gastrointestinal dysfunction
Severe, persistent vomiting leading to dehydration and hospitalization

Gastroparesis is by far the most frequently cited injury across all GLP-1 litigation, accounting for the majority of claims in both the federal MDL and the New Jersey MCL. Plaintiffs allege that their gastroparesis was caused or materially worsened by the gastric-slowing mechanism of GLP-1 drugs, and that Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly failed to adequately warn them or their physicians of this risk.

Track Two: Vision Loss / NAION MCL

The second litigation track covers GLP-1-associated vision loss, specifically non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy — NAION — a sudden and irreversible loss of blood flow to the optic nerve that causes permanent vision impairment. By mid-2025, New Jersey plaintiffs had sought coordinated multicounty treatment for NAION claims involving Ozempic and Wegovy, and those claims are now proceeding as a coordinated track within the New Jersey MCL.

The NAION litigation in New Jersey is being driven by the same body of scientific evidence that underpins the federal MDL 3163 vision loss proceedings. Multiple large peer-reviewed studies — including landmark research published in JAMA Ophthalmology in December 2024 and an epidemiological review by the European Medicines Agency in January 2025 — have identified elevated NAION risk in GLP-1 users. Lawsuits alleging GLP-1-linked blindness have grown rapidly, and New Jersey state court has become one of the primary venues for those claims. (Reuters)

Which Drugs Are Covered?

The New Jersey MCL is not limited to a single drug or manufacturer. The litigation encompasses the full range of GLP-1 receptor agonist medications from both Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly that have been linked to the injuries alleged, including:

Ozempic (semaglutide injectable) — Novo Nordisk
Wegovy (semaglutide injectable, higher dose) — Novo Nordisk
Rybelsus (oral semaglutide) — Novo Nordisk
Saxenda (liraglutide) — Novo Nordisk
Mounjaro (tirzepatide injectable) — Eli Lilly
Zepbound (tirzepatide injectable) — Eli Lilly
Trulicity (dulaglutide) — Eli Lilly

How the New Jersey MCL Differs From the Federal MDL

For plaintiffs and their attorneys, understanding the distinction between the New Jersey MCL and the federal MDL proceedings is essential. These are parallel but separate legal processes, and the choice between them — or the decision to pursue claims in both simultaneously — involves meaningful strategic considerations.

The Federal MDL Proceedings

The federal GLP-1 litigation is consolidated in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania before Judge Karen S. Marston and is divided into two MDLs. MDL 3094 covers gastrointestinal injury claims and currently encompasses more than 3,600 pending cases. MDL 3163 covers NAION vision loss claims and is growing rapidly since its establishment in December 2025. Both MDLs involve plaintiffs from across the country whose cases were filed in or transferred to federal court, and both operate under federal procedural rules.

The New Jersey MCL

The New Jersey MCL is a state-court proceeding. Cases filed in New Jersey state courts — or transferred there under the MCL designation — remain within the New Jersey judicial system and are governed by New Jersey procedural rules and substantive law. The presiding judge is Judge Gregg A. Padovano of the Bergen County Superior Court. The key practical differences between the two systems include:

Governing law: federal MDL cases are governed by federal procedural rules; New Jersey MCL cases are governed by New Jersey Rules of Court
Jury pool: state and federal courts draw from different jury pools, which can affect the composition and tendencies of juries in bellwether trials
Substantive law: while failure-to-warn and products liability theories are broadly similar across jurisdictions, state-specific legal nuances can affect how claims are evaluated and what damages are available
Discovery and case management: while federal and state proceedings may share expert witnesses and scientific evidence, their formal discovery processes are governed by separate rules and managed by separate judges

Why Plaintiffs Choose New Jersey State Court

The decision to file in New Jersey state court rather than federal court — or in addition to federal court — reflects a combination of legal strategy and practical circumstances. Plaintiffs and their counsel may prefer the New Jersey MCL for several reasons:

State procedural rules may be more favorable for certain types of claims or evidence
New Jersey’s established mass tort infrastructure provides a predictable and well-managed forum
Novo Nordisk’s U.S. headquarters in New Jersey provides a robust jurisdictional basis that is difficult for the company to challenge
State court litigation creates additional litigation pressure on manufacturers, increasing their overall settlement exposure across two parallel systems

Are the New Jersey Cases Class Actions?

No — and this is a distinction worth understanding clearly. The New Jersey GLP-1 proceedings are not class actions. They are coordinated individual lawsuits. Each plaintiff in the MCL maintains their own independent claim, based on their own medical history, their own injuries, and their own damages. Coordination is a procedural tool for managing the litigation efficiently — it does not merge claims or create a shared, undifferentiated plaintiff pool.

This structure means that compensation in the New Jersey MCL, as in the federal MDL, is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. A plaintiff with severe, well-documented injuries that required multiple hospitalizations and caused lasting disability is in a fundamentally different position than a plaintiff with a single adverse event that resolved without permanent consequences. The MCL structure ensures that both plaintiffs can be part of the coordinated litigation while having their individual circumstances fully considered at the resolution stage.

Core Legal Theories

The legal claims advanced in the New Jersey MCL are grounded in the same failure-to-warn and products liability framework that underlies the federal MDL proceedings. New Jersey products liability law provides plaintiffs with several distinct theories of recovery, each addressing a different aspect of the manufacturers’ alleged misconduct.

Failure to Warn

The central allegation across all GLP-1 litigation — in both federal and state proceedings — is that Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly knew or should have known about serious risks including gastroparesis, bowel obstruction, and NAION, and failed to provide adequate warnings to patients and their physicians. The failure-to-warn theory examines not just whether warnings were eventually added to drug labels, but whether those warnings were provided in a timely manner and whether the manufacturers acted on available safety data promptly.

Negligence

Plaintiffs allege that the manufacturers were negligent in the design, testing, and post-market monitoring of their GLP-1 products — specifically, that they failed to adequately investigate and respond to adverse event reports that were accumulating well before any meaningful label changes were made.

Product Liability

Under New Jersey’s Products Liability Act, manufacturers can be held liable for harm caused by products that are not reasonably fit, suitable, or safe for their intended or reasonably foreseeable uses. GLP-1 plaintiffs argue that the drugs’ documented capacity to cause serious gastrointestinal and optic nerve injuries — without adequate warning — renders them defective under this standard.

Misrepresentation

Some plaintiffs also allege that the manufacturers’ marketing communications affirmatively minimized or misrepresented the risk profile of their GLP-1 products, contributing to a false impression of safety that influenced both prescribing decisions and patients’ informed consent.

What Plaintiffs Must Establish

As in the federal MDL, New Jersey MCL plaintiffs must build their claims on a foundation of objective medical evidence. The elements that plaintiffs are generally required to establish include the following:

Confirmed use of a qualifying GLP-1 medication, documented through prescription records or pharmacy records
A qualifying injury — typically gastroparesis confirmed by gastric emptying study for GI claims, or NAION confirmed by ophthalmological evaluation for vision loss claims
Medical causation — evidence supporting the connection between GLP-1 use and the claimed injury
Damages — documented medical costs, lost income, pain and suffering, and other quantifiable harm resulting from the injury

The evidentiary standards being applied in the New Jersey MCL are informed by developments in the federal MDL, including Judge Marston’s August 2025 ruling in MDL 3094 requiring objective gastric emptying study confirmation for gastroparesis claims. New Jersey plaintiffs and their attorneys should expect similarly rigorous documentation requirements, and patients who have not yet undergone appropriate diagnostic testing should prioritize doing so.

Bellwether Trials in New Jersey

Like the federal MDL, the New Jersey MCL is expected to utilize bellwether trials as a mechanism for testing the strength of the legal theories, evaluating jury response to the evidence, and generating settlement value benchmarks. Bellwether trials are not binding on other plaintiffs — they are representative test cases — but their outcomes are among the most powerful inputs into global settlement negotiations in pharmaceutical mass tort litigation.

The timing and selection of New Jersey bellwether cases will depend on the pace of pretrial proceedings and the state court’s case management orders. Coordination between the New Jersey MCL and the federal MDL — both formal and informal — is likely to influence how the two systems’ bellwether timelines interact, and legal analysts are watching both proceedings closely for signals about when early trials might begin.

The Relationship Between the New Jersey MCL and the Federal MDL

Although the New Jersey MCL and the federal MDL are separate legal proceedings governed by different rules and presided over by different judges, they are not operating in complete isolation. Both proceedings involve the same defendants, the same underlying drugs, the same categories of injury, and substantially the same scientific evidence. In practice, there is significant overlap in:

Scientific and medical expert witnesses, many of whom are likely to be engaged by plaintiffs’ counsel in both proceedings
Documentary discovery, including internal manufacturer records, clinical trial data, and regulatory correspondence
Legal theory, with failure-to-warn arguments in New Jersey tracking closely with those being advanced in the federal MDL

Courts in both systems are aware of the parallel proceedings and may coordinate informally to avoid redundancy and promote efficiency. At the same time, each system’s rulings are independent and could potentially diverge in important ways — creating both strategic complexity and strategic opportunity for plaintiffs’ counsel managing cases in both venues.

Why the New Jersey MCL Matters Nationally

The significance of the New Jersey MCL extends beyond its impact on individual New Jersey plaintiffs. State court mass tort proceedings of this scale create systemic pressure on pharmaceutical defendants that the federal MDL alone cannot replicate. The practical consequences of parallel federal and state litigation include:

Expanded discovery risk for manufacturers, who must respond to document requests and depositions in two parallel systems
Additional bellwether trial exposure, with state court juries potentially producing outcomes that differ from federal court bellwether results
Increased aggregate settlement pressure as the total litigation footprint — federal and state combined — grows larger
A broader evidentiary record, as state and federal proceedings may develop different aspects of the scientific and regulatory record

The history of major pharmaceutical mass tort litigation confirms this pattern. Both the talc and Risperdal litigations, which New Jersey previously managed at scale, involved significant parallel state and federal proceedings that collectively shaped the manufacturers’ ultimate settlement decisions. GLP-1 litigation is following the same trajectory.

Current Status and What to Expect

As of May 2026, the New Jersey GLP-1 MCL is in active pretrial proceedings. Both the gastrointestinal injury track and the NAION vision loss track are accepting new filings, and case counts continue to grow as more injured patients come forward. No global settlement has been reached in either the New Jersey MCL or the federal MDL proceedings, and the litigation timeline is expected to run well into 2027 and beyond before global resolution discussions are likely to advance meaningfully.

The compensation available to New Jersey MCL plaintiffs will depend on the specific facts of each case. Damages that may be available include:

Economic damages: medical expenses incurred, future treatment costs, lost wages, and diminished earning capacity
Non-economic damages: pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of enjoyment and quality of life
In cases involving permanent disability — such as irreversible vision loss from NAION or chronic gastroparesis — long-term care costs and ongoing quality-of-life impairments are significant components of the damages calculus

Key Takeaways

For plaintiffs, attorneys, and observers following the GLP-1 litigation, the New Jersey MCL represents a significant and growing component of the national legal response to these injuries. The essential points to understand are:

New Jersey has established multicounty litigation (MCL) for GLP-1 lawsuits, covering both gastrointestinal injuries and NAION vision loss claims
The MCL is presided over by Judge Gregg A. Padovano of the Bergen County Superior Court and operates under New Jersey procedural rules
The New Jersey MCL is a separate proceeding from the federal MDL but involves substantially the same legal theories, injuries, and defendants
Cases in the MCL are individual lawsuits — not a class action — and compensation is evaluated on the specific facts of each plaintiff’s case
Novo Nordisk’s New Jersey headquarters and the state’s established mass tort infrastructure make it a strategically significant venue for GLP-1 plaintiffs
The parallel state and federal proceedings collectively increase the litigation pressure on manufacturers and expand the evidentiary and bellwether trial record

Injured patients who are evaluating their legal options should consult with a qualified attorney to determine whether filing in New Jersey state court, the federal MDL, or both is appropriate for their specific circumstances. The procedural and substantive differences between the two systems can materially affect litigation strategy and, ultimately, outcomes.