"GLP-1 lawsuit" is searched as if there were one. There are two federal dockets, one judge, and a long list of rulings that have not yet reached the question most people assume a lawsuit answers — whether the drugs cause the injuries claimed. This page reads the record from the court's own orders and the federal panel's monthly statistics, as of 27 September 2026. It is not legal advice, and an allegation in a complaint is not a finding.
The safety data the claims rest on is covered elsewhere on this site: the labels' own counts are on GLP-1 side effects, the gallbladder numbers on gallbladder problems, and what up to seven years of follow-up shows on long-term side effects.
The two federal dockets
| MDL 3094 | MDL 3163 | |
|---|---|---|
| Injuries | Gastroparesis, ileus/intestinal obstruction, gallbladder injury, severe nausea and vomiting | Non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) — sudden vision loss |
| Court | Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 2:24-md-3094 | Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 2:25-md-3163 |
| Judge | Karen Spencer Marston | Karen Spencer Marston |
| Motion filed / centralised | 1 December 2023 / 2 February 2024 | 19 August 2025 / 15 December 2025 |
| Pending actions, 1 Sept 2026 | 4,022 (4,056 ever filed) | 216 |
Source: Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, Pending MDL Dockets reports dated 1 September 2026.
A multidistrict litigation is not a class action. Each case stays an individual personal-injury claim; the panel sends them to one judge so that discovery, expert challenges and common legal questions are handled once. On the panel's 1 September list, MDL 3094 ranked 13th of 166 active dockets by pending actions, just ahead of the Roundup litigation, and held about 2% of all 206,182 actions pending in federal MDLs (our arithmetic from the same report).
The drugs named on the court's MDL page are Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus (Novo Nordisk) and Trulicity and Mounjaro (Eli Lilly). Zepbound — the same molecule as Mounjaro, sold for weight — is not in that list. The court's 2024 order noted that Saxenda cases were being considered for inclusion, and that two blood-clot cases had been stayed because the MDL was limited to gastrointestinal events.
How the court chose to run it
In Case Management Order No. 18 (23 August 2024), the court took up the manufacturers' request to decide three "cross cutting" questions before anything else:
- Gastroparesis diagnostic testing — can gastroparesis be reliably diagnosed without an objective test?
- Preemption and adequacy of warnings — are the claims barred because the FDA-approved labels already warned of gastrointestinal effects, or because federal law preempts them?
- General causation — can these drugs cause the injuries alleged at all? (The court reserved its decision on sequencing this one in 2024.)
Plaintiffs had asked instead for six bellwether cases with all discovery running together. The court sided with the manufacturers on the first two issues. Its reasoning shows why gastroparesis mattered: plaintiffs' leadership had told the court in June 2024 that "over 95%" of cases would allege it, and most of the labels already warned of nausea and vomiting — so a claim that rests on symptoms the label names may fail under the learned intermediary doctrine, while "not all the GLP-1 RAs' labels … warned for gastroparesis". At the time there were 842 cases; leadership counsel said about 7,600 more were under investigation.
The August 2025 ruling
On 15 August 2025 Judge Marston decided the first issue (reported as 2025 WL 2396801): a plaintiff claiming drug-induced gastroparesis must have had a gastric emptying study at the time of diagnosis. The court excluded plaintiffs' expert opinion that a clinician could diagnose it by ruling out other causes, and described the theory that symptoms starting within three months of the first dose were enough as a hypothesis not yet "subjected to the rigors of science".
What that means in practice: a gastroparesis case without a contemporaneous test — scintigraphy, a breath test or a wireless motility capsule, per the reported ruling — cannot go forward as a gastroparesis claim. It does not decide whether the drugs cause gastroparesis, and it does not touch the ileus or gallbladder claims.
The docket kept growing after it: 842 cases when the court set the cross-cutting schedule in August 2024, 4,022 pending on the panel's 1 September 2026 report.
Where it stands now
| Date | Step (Cross Cutting Issues 2 and 3) | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 19 May 2026 | Motions to exclude experts and summary-judgment motions due | CMO 32, 30 April 2026 |
| 17 June / 30 June 2026 | Opposition briefs | CMO 32 |
| 15 July / 7 August 2026 | Reply briefs | CMO 32 |
| 14–18 September 2026 | Rule 702 ("Daubert") evidentiary hearing, Courtroom 16B | Order of 28 August 2026 (moved from 10–18 September) |
| 27 September 2026 | No ruling posted on the court's MDL page | our check |
The deadlines in CMO 32 were extended at Novo Nordisk's unopposed request; it is the fifth amended schedule for these two issues. Until they are decided, no bellwether trial date has been set on the court's page.
What the last diabetes-drug MDL did
The court's 2024 order cites an earlier docket as a model for deciding threshold issues first: In re Incretin-Based Therapies (MDL 2452, Southern District of California), in which plaintiffs alleged that Byetta, Januvia, Janumet and Victoza — Victoza being liraglutide, a GLP-1 drug — caused pancreatic cancer. That litigation ran for about nine years. After the trial court excluded the plaintiffs' general-causation experts and granted summary judgment, the Ninth Circuit affirmed as to Novo Nordisk on 28 March 2022 (No. 21-55342), holding that the court had not abused its discretion in excluding the expert after an extensive Daubert hearing.
It is a precedent for the procedure, not a prediction. The injuries, the evidence and the labels are different, and the gastrointestinal effects in MDL 3094 are ones the labels already count — which is why the case turns on specific diagnoses and warnings rather than on whether the drugs affect the gut at all.
The vision-loss docket
MDL 3163 gathers claims that semaglutide and related drugs caused NAION, a sudden loss of vision from reduced blood flow to the optic nerve. The panel centralised it on 15 December 2025 before the same judge, which keeps coordination simple; it held 216 actions on 1 September 2026. What the labels and regulators say about eye effects is reported on our Ozempic side effects page, which covers the retinopathy warning, and on is GLP-1 safe?.
What this page does not cover
- Compounded and counterfeit products. Neither docket's description covers compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide; the regulatory record is on our compounded semaglutide page.
- State courts. Any case filed in a state court is outside the federal panel's statistics, so the counts above are federal only.
- Advice. Whether someone has a claim depends on their records, their state's law and its filing deadlines — a question for a lawyer licensed there. Whether to keep taking a prescribed medicine is a question for the prescriber; stopping has its own consequences, set out on stopping GLP-1 medication.
Sources
- Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, Pending MDL Dockets by Actions Pending and by MDL Number, report date 1 September 2026 (jpml.uscourts.gov).
- U.S. District Court, E.D. Pa., MDL 3094 page and orders: Case Management Order No. 18, Cross Cutting Issues (Doc. 235, 23 August 2024); Case Management Order No. 32 (Doc. 658, 30 April 2026); Order rescheduling the Rule 702 hearing (Doc. 881, 28 August 2026) (paed.uscourts.gov).
- In re GLP-1 RAs Prods. Liab. Litig., MDL No. 3094, 2025 WL 2396801 (E.D. Pa. 15 Aug. 2025), as reported by Dechert LLP and the Drug & Device Law blog.
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, In re Incretin-Based Therapies Prods. Liab. Litig., No. 21-55342, memorandum filed 28 March 2022.