Depo-Provera Lawsuit Timeline: The Court Record, Month by Month

February 2025: one federal court becomes the coordinating center

The federal story starts on February 7, 2025. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation transferred 27 actions pending in eight districts to the Northern District of Florida and assigned them to Judge M. Casey Rodgers. The panel also recorded 41 potentially related actions in 16 districts. Its order identified shared questions about depot medroxyprogesterone acetate, or DMPA, and alleged meningioma injuries. It did not decide that DMPA caused a tumor, that any warning was legally inadequate, or that a plaintiff was entitled to compensation.

Within days, the court consolidated the transferred cases for pretrial management and scheduled an initial conference. On February 23, Case Management Order No. 1 laid out early work on leadership, discovery and a proposed group of pilot cases. That sequence matters: an MDL is a procedure for coordinating recurring pretrial issues, not a class-action judgment. Each filed action still has its own product-use history, diagnosis, governing state law and defenses.

March through July 2025: documentation and common discovery

March brought the infrastructure that would govern thousands of later filings. Pretrial Order No. 10 allowed direct filing in the Northern District of Florida for MDL purposes. Pretrial Order No. 17 required initial documentary proof of use and initial documentary proof of an alleged meningioma injury. A later deficiency process gave the court a way to identify submissions that were missing or incomplete. These orders are case-management filters; they are not public eligibility rules for a settlement and do not establish medical causation.

By July 2025, the court was reporting on general-causation discovery, preemption arguments, proof submissions, state-court coordination and proposed pilot cases. The official JPML snapshots show the scale changing rapidly: 78 actions were pending on March 3, 2025, and 435 were pending on July 1. Those numbers describe the federal docket on two reporting dates. They exclude state-court cases and should not be read as the number of people medically affected or the number of successful claims.

Late 2025 to early 2026: the merits questions sharpen

The court's later 2025 management orders tracked pilot-case discovery, duplicate cases, threshold proof and parallel state proceedings. By January 2026, Case Management Order No. 10 set supplemental briefing on federal preemption and continued pilot-case and proof-of-use work. Preemption asks, in broad terms, whether federal drug regulation forecloses particular state-law warning claims. It is a legal defense distinct from the scientific question of whether DMPA is capable of causing the alleged injury.

Pretrial Order No. 30, entered January 27, addressed how eventual preemption and Rule 702 rulings could apply across individual actions. Rule 702 is the federal evidence rule governing expert testimony. The scheduled hearing is therefore a gatekeeping event about whether specified expert opinions may be used; it is not a jury trial and does not itself calculate damages. On March 7, Case Management Order No. 11 reported that pilot discovery, expert depositions, preemption briefing and threshold-proof review were continuing.

June 2026: an agreement is disclosed, but litigation continues

The most consequential public update arrived in Pretrial Order No. 30A, signed June 15, 2026 and listed on the court's order page in June. The court said plaintiffs' lead counsel and Pfizer, Pharmacia LLC, and Pharmacia & Upjohn Co. LLC had entered an agreement under which plaintiffs with pending MDL cases who meet criteria agreed by the parties would have an opportunity to resolve claims. The order calls it a global agreement, but it does not attach the agreement, publish a value matrix, identify individual participants, or state that every claimant qualifies.

The same order makes clear that the MDL did not end. Judge Rodgers postponed a ruling on the defendants' preemption motion, moved the Rule 702 hearing from June 24–25 to July 27, and said the expert issues would proceed because the agreement, once finalized, would not resolve all cases. It also explained how existing plaintiffs would be bound by the general-causation ruling and reserved further procedures for some cases filed after the order. Agreement, judicial approval, payment and dismissal are separate events; the public record should not collapse them into one headline.

Where the timeline stands on July 10, 2026

JPML's July 1 report lists 5,830 actions pending in MDL 3140 and 5,916 historical actions filed in or transferred to it. The 86-action difference is not a loss tally; historical totals can include actions no longer pending for many procedural reasons. The federal court page lists a Rule 702 hearing for July 27 and additional 2026 case-management conferences. Future scheduling can change, so a hearing date should always be checked against the court's current page rather than an undated marketing article.

The next legally meaningful milestones are source-specific: any order addressing expert admissibility, any renewed or decided preemption motion, and any public filing that explains how unresolved cases will be managed. The global agreement is real because the court described it. Its private terms are not public facts simply because people want answers. Until a court filing or authorized administrator supplies more detail, responsible reporting should label the agreement as disclosed, eligibility terms as nonpublic, and unresolved cases as ongoing.

Reader questions

Frequently asked questions