Judicial Hellholes 2025: St. Louis and Illinois Under the Spotlight Again

Nuclear Verdict Trends in St. Louis and Illinois

St. Louis City Circuit Court has ranked among the top six jurisdictions nationwide for the highest combined nuclear verdicts against businesses, a trend that has persisted for more than a decade issuing $957 million in verdicts across just two cases in 2024.

One of those verdicts, a $462 million award against Wabash Trucking Company arose out of a fatal highway collision in September 2024 where plaintiff rear-ended a big rig that was stopped in traffic and slid underneath its trailer. The accident occurred in broad daylight, plaintiff had a blood alcohol concentration above the legal limit, and neither the driver nor the passenger wore seatbelts. However, the jury was prevented from hearing this critical evidence, in part due to Missouri’s “seat belt gag rule,” which restricted Wabash’s ability to rebut Plaintiff’s theory that, but for the rig allegedly failing, Plaintiffs would have survived striking the truck at approximately 55 miles per hour.

Other nuclear verdicts in St. Louis include a $48.1 million medical liability award and a $25 million product liability award, both occurring in March 2025. Illinois courts, too, maintain a reputation for nuclear verdicts ranking sixth in the country for most verdicts over $10 million over a ten-year period, particularly in Cook, St. Clair, and Madison Counties.

Asbestos Litigation Expands Following Illinois Supreme Court Ruling

Illinois’ burgeoning asbestos litigation was abetted by the Illinois Supreme Court’s January 2025 decision in Martin v. Goodrich Corp., 2025 IL 130509, 486 Ill. Dec. 157, 268 N.E.3d 170. In Martin, the Court upheld the 2019 amendment to the Illinois Workers’ Occupational Diseases Act which expanded the ability of employees (or their heirs) to bring tort claims for latent occupational diseases like asbestos or other long-latency conditions that would have been barred under the old workers’ compensation exclusivity and repose rules.

In 2024, Madison County ranked the top jurisdiction for asbestos fillings nationwide, with 882 filings followed second by Saint Clair County with 820 filings, a 22% increase from 2023. Cook County landed in the top 5 with 176 filings. The decision in Martin will further increase these numbers in 2026.

Jurisdictional Expansion and Forum Shopping in Illinois

Further opening the floodgates in Illinois courts, in July 2025, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed S.B. 328 into law, a measure critics say will make Illinois an even more attractive forum for out-of-state litigation. The law expands general personal jurisdiction by treating a corporation’s registration to do business in Illinois as consent to be sued in Illinois courts, even for claims unrelated to the company’s conduct in the state. Plaintiffs’ lawyers can assert that even unregistered companies should be “deemed” to have consented to Illinois jurisdiction based on business activity conducted in the state.

The statute applies broadly to claims involving exposure to any substance capable of causing injury, extending beyond asbestos to include lawsuits involving food, medication, infant formula, and other products. As plaintiffs’ lawyers continue to funnel out-of-state cases into Cook, Madison, and St. Clair Counties due to their plaintiff-friendly reputations, Illinois residents will increasingly bear the cost, through crowded dockets, strained court resources, and longer delays in having their own disputes resolved efficiently.

Infant Formula, Roundup and Expert Testimony Challenges

St. Louis, Madison and St. Clair Counties alike have further been criticized in the 2025 report by the prevalence of junk science, particularly in plaintiff-driven “failure to warn” and consumer-protection claims targeting life-sustaining infant formula. In these cases, plaintiffs’ attorneys, advance theories that prescribed fortified infant formula increases the risk of necrotizing enterocolitis (“NEC”) in premature infants. However, the FDA does not require NEC-related warnings for these products. Moreover, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the NEC Society have publicly expressed concern that these lawsuits and verdicts risk harmful consequences for infant care, including discouraging the use of medically necessary formulas prescribed by physicians in neonatal intensive care units. State courts in St. Louis City have rejected the defense doctrine protecting manufacturers who have warned the prescribing physician who ultimately makes recommendations to the patient.

On the Illinois side, Mead Johnson and Abbott, neither of which are Illinois based companies, have continued to wage jurisdictional and venue challenges to baby formula litigation in Madison and St. Clair, with little success. In June 2025, the Illinois Fifth District Appellate Court rejected Abbott’s and Mead Johnson’s venue challenges, allowing thousands of baby formula cases to remain in Madison County. Jupiter v. Mead Johnson & Co., 2025 IL App (5th) 230248. Mead Johnson has since petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court, arguing the appeal was dismissed on technical captioning grounds, that the lower courts relied on outdated corporate filings, and that the venue standard is unworkable given baby formula sales occur indirectly through wholesalers and retailers.

Similar critiques on the use of junk science and questionable expert theories are waged against St. Louis in Round-Up lawsuits filed against Monsanto alleging that glyphosate, an active ingredient causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In February 2025, the Court of Appeals of Missouri, Eastern District, affirmed a St. Louis jury’s $1.25 million failure-to-warn verdict against Monsanto which is now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Missouri Court of Appeals agreed that Roundup bottles should carry a cancer warning, contradicting federal regulators that do not require such labeling. The court held that Missouri’s failure-to-warn standard is not preempted by federal law, blurring the lines of uniformity within the regulatory system.

ADA, BIPA and GIPA: High-Volume Statutory Litigation

The 2025-2026 report further evidences a wave of ADA litigation targeting St. Louis businesses involving alleged website accessibility barriers over ADA’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), largely driven by Kansas-City based attorneys. In one example, a legally blind plaintiff sent a demand letter to a small sandwich shop located more than 200 miles away, despite the fact that the restaurant does not offer delivery and the plaintiff lives over three hours from the business. Since September 18, 2025, this serial plaintiff has filed 69 cases alleging nearly identical ADA violations. Critics point to the irony that while these attorneys aggressively pursue WCAG-based claims, their own websites have reportedly been flagged for similar accessibility issues.

Consistent with last year’s report, the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (“BIPA”) remains a powerful and attractive vehicle for class action litigation. This trend was fueled in large part by the Illinois Supreme Court’s 2019 decision holding that plaintiffs need not allege or prove actual injury beyond a statutory violation to pursue damages and injunctive relief. Although BIPA continues to be a favored weapon of the Illinois plaintiffs’ bar, the statute saw meaningful reform with the August 2024 enactment of S.B. 2979. The amendment limits the number of actionable violations to a single instance, regardless of how many times a business scans or transmits an individual’s biometric information, eliminating the “per scan” damages theory recognized by the Illinois Supreme Court in Cothron v. White Castle Sys., 2023 IL 128004, 466 Ill. Dec. 85, 216 N.E.3d 918. Litigation over the scope of this reform is ongoing, including a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, originating in Cook County, that could determine whether the 2024 amendment applies retroactively.

Even with these reforms, BIPA filings have persisted and plaintiffs’ attorneys in Illinois have now pivoted to the Genetic Information Privacy Act (“GIPA”), enacted in 1998 to protect disclosure of genetic information. As with BIPA, GIPA creates significant statutory liability, authorizing damages of $2,500 per negligent violation or actual damages, whichever is greater, and $15,000 per violation for intentional or reckless violations. Six class action GIPA lawsuits were filed in Illinois in 2025 challenging pre-employment questions about family medical history and targeting the statute’s broad definition of “genetic information.” These suits were concentrated in Cook County and the federal courts that encompass it, as well as the Southern District of Illinois covering Madison and St. Clair Counties, further reinforcing these jurisdictions as preferred venues for high-volume, plaintiff-driven class actions and adding strain to already congested dockets.