MDL 3026 Finally Has a Jury in the NEC Docket

The short version

Inman v. Mead Johnson & Company, LLC, No. 1:22-cv-03737, is being tried before Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer in the Northern District of Illinois. It is the first case in MDL 3026 to reach a jury and the first federal Enfamil case, with roughly 825 actions pending behind it.
The first-wave bellwethers, all Similac cases, ended at summary judgment after the court excluded plaintiffs' causation experts. In Inman the court denied summary judgment in May and preserved the plaintiff's epidemiology testimony, which is why this one is in front of a jury.
State juries have produced more than $625 million in plaintiff verdicts, but the appellate math has been moving the other way: the first NEC verdict in the country was reversed in June for instruction error, and a St. Louis jury returned a defense verdict for Mead Johnson on July 2.
The Seventh Circuit's July 24 affirmance in Mar v. Abbott is the more important document for anyone holding inventory. It turned on warning causation, not science, and it makes NICU-specific facts the variable that prices a case.

The NEC infant formula litigation has been running for four years without a federal jury ever hearing it. That changed this week in Chicago, where Inman v. Mead Johnson is being tried before Judge Rebecca Pallmeyer, who has presided over MDL 3026 since the Panel centralized the preterm infant nutrition cases in the Northern District of Illinois. Roughly 825 cases are pending on the federal docket, with hundreds more in state court.

The plaintiff, Alexis Inman, alleges that her son Daniel was born at 29 weeks, transitioned in the NICU from fortified breast milk to exclusive feeding with Mead Johnson's Enfamil Premature product, developed necrotizing enterocolitis, underwent surgery on June 22, 2020, and died the next day. The claims are failure to warn and design defect, the latter resting on the argument that a different carbohydrate formulation was available and safer.

Plaintiff-side announcements are calling this the first bellwether trial. It is more precisely the first bellwether to reach a jury. Three earlier bellwethers were tried in the sense that they were worked up, scheduled, and then lost before openings, which is a different fact pattern and a more instructive one.

Three cases that died at the gate

The first wave of MDL bellwethers all involved Abbott's Similac. In each, Pallmeyer excluded the plaintiffs' causation experts and granted summary judgment, so no jury heard the evidence. Read against a state-court record that includes a half-billion-dollar verdict, that divergence looks strange until you separate the two questions being asked. State juries were asked whether cow's-milk-based preterm formula causes NEC and whether the manufacturers said enough about it. The federal court was asked, first, whether the expert methodology clears Rule 702, and the answer three times was no.

Inman is different for a narrow procedural reason. The court denied Mead Johnson's summary judgment motion in May and preserved the plaintiff's epidemiology testimony, meaning the jury will hear plaintiff experts on causation for the first time in the federal docket. That is the entire significance of the trial date. Everything else being said about it this week is atmosphere.

Worth noting for anyone who plans around trial calendars: this case was set for February, then July 6, then mid-August. Three announced dates for one trial is normal in a large MDL and abnormal in the press releases written about them.

The state record is not the tailwind it looks like

The plaintiff-side numbers are real. A Missouri jury returned $495 million against Abbott in 2024, and that verdict survived appeal. A Cook County jury awarded $70 million to four families in April, roughly $53 million compensatory and $17 million punitive, after a short deliberation. The aggregate across state verdicts is north of $625 million.

The erosion is also real, and it is more recent. On June 16 an Illinois appellate court reversed the $60 million Watson verdict against Mead Johnson, the first NEC verdict in the country, on jury instruction grounds and ordered a new trial. Two weeks later a St. Louis jury returned a defense verdict for Mead Johnson in the Collins case. The only defense verdict that had been vacated for trial misconduct is itself on appeal. A verdict is not money until it survives review, and this docket has now demonstrated that at both ends.

Warning causation is the variable that prices the inventory

The most consequential ruling of the summer was not in Chicago. On July 24 the Seventh Circuit affirmed dismissal in Mar v. Abbott, one of the original bellwethers, holding that the plaintiff could not show a stronger NEC warning would have changed anything, because the treating physicians already understood the risk and had no viable alternative to fortified formula for that infant at that time.

That is a learned-intermediary holding with a feeding-practice overlay, and it does not depend on the science being weak. It means the questions that decide a case are hospital-specific and date-specific. Did that NICU have a donor milk program in place. Was maternal milk available in sufficient volume. What did the treating neonatologist know about NEC risk, and what will that neonatologist say in deposition about whether a different label would have altered the feeding order. Firms evaluating NEC inventory on gestational age and diagnosis alone are underwriting a different tort than the one the Seventh Circuit just described.

Durnell shows up in formula

On August 5 the court denied Mead Johnson's motion arguing that the Supreme Court's Roundup preemption decision in Monsanto v. Durnell controls here, with the Infant Formula Act standing in for the federal labeling scheme at issue there. The denial was without prejudice, which means the argument returns after trial and in every case behind this one.

The cross-tort point is the one to keep. Durnell was decided in a herbicide case and is now being run in a food and drug regulatory context within months. Any tort where a federal statute touches the label should expect the same motion, and the useful question is not whether it wins but how much calendar it consumes when it is filed in a thousand cases at once.

What a verdict does

A plaintiff verdict gives the federal docket its first data point and changes the posture of roughly 825 cases plus the state inventory. It would also cut against the read that has developed since the first-wave dismissals, which is that the federal forum is structurally hostile to these claims. A defense verdict makes it four federal failures out of four and leaves plaintiffs with a state-court record that appellate courts have started trimming.

The exposure estimates in circulation should be read as ranges rather than figures. Bloomberg Intelligence has put total liability in the low billions; plaintiff-side materials this week cite analyst estimates running from the hundreds of millions to several billion pounds. The gap between those numbers is the same gap the jury is about to address, and neither end of it is a settlement value. What moves that number is not this verdict alone but whether the second bellwether wave produces a pattern, and whether the warning-causation record holds up when the next case has a NICU with a donor milk program in it.

For where this sits alongside the other dockets moving this year, see the 2026 mass tort map.