Bart H. Williams

LOS ANGELES - Bart H. Williams is a former assistant U.S. attorney who now heads Proskauer Rose LLP's Los Angeles office and is an immediate past member of the firm's executive committee. He moved to Proskauer in 2016 after 21 years at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP, where he was firm co-managing partner.

His litigation docket is crowded with commercial, white collar defense and corporate investigation cases. "It's going great," he said in early January. "We've had a very good year. Trial-wise, there have been a lot of product liability cases."

Among his clients: Monsanto Co. and its herbicide Roundup, the target of several ongoing cases. In 2022, Williams was awarded one of The Daily Journal's Top Verdicts honors after a San Bernardino County jury held that there was insufficient evidence to find that Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, causes non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Stephens v. Monsanto Co., CGC-20-58576411/CIVSB2104801 (S. Bernardino Co. Super. Ct., filed Aug. 4, 2020).

"It was the first case where there's a finding by the jury on the issue of causation," Williams said. "The first three Roundup trials were won by plaintiffs for huge amounts. Then the client brought us in to do Stephens, and our win started a series of defense verdicts, four in a row. My colleague Manuel Cachán did Stephens with me and got another win himself. So Stephens was a very important outcome."

Next up is a San Francisco trial over claims by a former Roundup user that he developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from the product. Freiwald v. Monsanto Co., CGC-21-594817 (S.F. Super. Ct., filed Aug. 26, 2021).

"These individual plaintiffs have their own stories to tell," Williams said, pointing out that each case is unique. "So the result in Stephens won't necessarily impact Freiwald because there are different types of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma involved and different types of exposure."

The Freiwald litigation is a challenge, Williams pointed out, because he'll be facing off with plaintiff lawyers from Andrus Wagstaff PC, who won an $80 million Roundup verdict in 2019. It will be the first time since Willaims turned the tide with Stephens that Monsanto will oppose plaintiffs represented by a firm that previously won a Roundup verdict.

Williams will have the advantage of testimony from a genomics researcher, Cristian Tomasetti, who was pivotal in the Stephens trial. "He established that 95.6% of the genetic mutations that lead to non-Hodgkins lymphoma are caused by natural cellular replication errors. So plaintiffs have to prove they are part of the 4%," Williams said.

Also, Williams is lead trial counsel for Gilead Sciences Inc. in a number of California state and federal actions brought by approximately 20,000 plaintiffs over Gilead's HIV prevention and treatment drugs. The complaints allege either that Gilead was negligent in its development of so-called TAF antiretroviral drugs or that other drugs were defectively designed and failed adequately to warn about the increased risk of kidney disease and bone injury that could result from their use.

The first federal bellwether trial in the litigation is set for January 2024. Holley et al. v. Gilead Sciences Inc., 4:18-cv-06972 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 16, 2018).