JUUL Labs E-Cigarette Litigation

In re: JUUL Labs, Inc. Mktg., Sales Practices, & Prods. Liab. Litig.
United States District Court, Northern District of California
MDL No. 2913

Case Status

In December 2022, on the eve of trial, the parties notified the Court that four global settlements had been reached with JUUL and its founders and directors. The settlement will create settlement programs to resolve the government entity cases, personal injury cases, tribal cases, and nationwide class action.

The JUUL class action settlement was granted final approval in September 2023. The first bellwether case against Altria Group, Inc. and its subsidiaries, brought by the San Francisco Unified School District, proceed to trial in April 2023. After Plaintiffs rested their case, a $235 million settlement was reached with Altria and was announced on May 10, 2023. The Altria class settlement was granted final approval in March 2024.

The scope of the MDL settlements is enormous, creating a program to resolve over 8,500 personal injury cases, a nationwide class action, and over 1,500 county, city and school district cases. The government entity settlements have provided and will continue to provide resources to school districts, cities, and counties to abate youth nicotine addiction in their communities.

Case Overview

Keller Rohrback L.L.P. represented multiple government entities that have spent resources addressing, or whose property has been affected by, the use of JUUL and other vapor products by the youth in Plaintiffs’ respective schools and counties.

Plaintiffs alleged that Defendants, including JUUL and tobacco giant Altria were responsible for the public health crisis of youth vaping and youth nicotine addiction.

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What is the Vaping Epidemic?

One of the great public health success stories over the past decade has been a reduction in youth tobacco use and in nicotine addiction. Youth smoking rates plummeted from 28% in 2000 to 7.6% in 2017. This success has been the result of years of litigation and strict regulation. It is also due to a public health message that Big Tobacco can no longer dispute or contradict, and which is simple, stark, and effective: smoking kills.
This success has been largely reversed due to a large increase in youth use of e-cigarettes and vapor products. Between 2017 and 2018, e-cigarette use increased 78% among high school students nationwide, from 11.7% of high school students in 2017 to 20.8% of high schoolers in 2018. Among middle school students, e-cigarette use increased 48% between 2017 and 2018. The increase in youth nicotine vaping from 2017 to 2018 was the largest for any substance tracked by the national Monitoring the Future surveys over the past 44 years. Youth vaping peaked in 2019, when 27.5% of high school students reported current use of e-cigarettes. 59% of those students reported JUUL as their usual e-cigarette brand.
Vape devices aerosolize a nicotine solution to allow users to inhale larger amounts of nicotine “vapor” without smoking a traditional cigarette. Vapor products are sold in a variety of youth-friendly flavors, such as Mango and Mint.
The Surgeon General has characterized e-cigarette use by youth as a public health epidemic.