Johnson & Johnson asked the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday to transfer a talcum powder case out of St. Louis in the latest attempt to avoid a venue where juries have awarded multimillion-dollar verdicts to ovarian cancer victims and their families.

Michael Blaes filed his lawsuit after his wife, Shawn Blaes, died from ovarian cancer in 2010. The case is among thousands against Johnson & Johnson over its baby powder and other talcum powder products.

At issue is whether Rex Burlison, the St. Louis judge overseeing the case, abused his discretion in allowing Blaes, who originally sued in St. Louis County Circuit Court, located in Clayton, Missouri, to go to trial in the city of St. Louis. The Missouri Supreme Court temporarily halted an Oct. 16 trial of Blaes case, taking up a writ of prohibition filed by Johnson & Johnson.

But the arguments focused on Missouri's rules that permit, in certain circumstances, multiple plaintiffs to be joined in the same case and tried in the same venue. Blaes and other talc plaintiffs have used those rules to turn St. Louis into a “boundless venue,” Johnson & Johnson attorney Thomas Weaver of Armstrong Teasdale wrote in his appeal brief. Burlison has allowed hundreds of plaintiffs outside St. Louis to join St. Louis residents so that their talc claims are in a single case. In 2016 and 2017, juries in St. Louis, hearing the claims of some of those nonresident plaintiffs, awarded verdicts ranging from $55 million to $110 million.

“Mr. Blaes is one of hundreds of plaintiffs with no business in St. Louis City who have nevertheless brought their claims there,” he wrote. “They have done so through manipulation of joinder rules, linking dozens of cases to the claims of a few plaintiffs with no connections to the forum.”

Johnson & Johnson and Imerys Talc America, which also appealed the Blaes case, called on the Missouri Supreme Court to provide some guidance.

“The appellate courts are listening,” said Imerys attorney Susan Robertson of The Robertson Law Group in in Kansas City, Missouri. “Everyone wants guidance on what to do.”

A Johnson & Johnson spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Imerys spokeswoman Gwen Myers said in an emailed statement: “Imerys continues to maintain that it is subject to neither personal jurisdiction nor venue in the City of St Louis.”

But plaintiffs attorney Ted Meadows, who is spearheading the talc trials in Missouri, said the Blaes arguments were simply a “delay tactic” to avoid trial.

“This is pretty specific as to the Blaes plaintiff,” said Meadows, of Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles. “Our interpretation of the rules is that it's properly joined and therefore should go forward in St. Louis City along with the other cases it was filed with. And I think that's what you'll see the appellate court rule. I don't think a ruling here will have an impact on other cases.”

In fact, he said, the Missouri Supreme Court on Jan. 23 refused to take up Johnson & Johnson's writ of prohibition to halt the next trial in June that involves 22 plaintiffs.

Procedural fights have mired the Blaes case from the start. After Johnson & Johnson removed the case from St. Louis County to federal court, Blaes dismissed it in 2016 and refiled it in the city of St. Louis. In court papers, Johnson & Johnson accused Blaes' lawyers of “blatant forum shopping,” insisting they made the tactical move soon after a St. Louis jury awarded $72 million in the first talc trial.

The Blaes case was consolidated into another case that involved 61 plaintiffs, most of whom aren't from Missouri. Blaes went to trial in June, along with the husbands of two other women who weren't from Missouri. But Burlison declared a mistrial after the U.S. Supreme Court's June 19 ruling in Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court made it harder for plaintiffs to sue in states outside their own.

Bristol-Myers, however, didn't prevent Blaes from going to trial in Missouri, so Burlison scheduled a retrial in October. After Burlison rejected a request by Johnson & Johnson to move the case out of his courtroom, Johnson & Johnson filed a writ of prohibition on Oct. 3 before the Missouri Supreme Court, which temporarily granted it.

On Tuesday, plaintiffs lawyer Edward “Chip” Robertson, a partner at Leawood, Kansas-based Bartimus Frickleton Robertson, argued that severing the Blaes case would run afoul of Missouri's rules, which focus on efficiencies in mass torts.

“We're left now with a decision by a trial court that it wants to try to be efficient and expedient,” he told the panel. “Is this the case where the court wants to plant its flag?”

Weaver acknowledged that, under Missouri rules, cases could be joined together but insisted that judges should be allowed to sever a plaintiff's claims ahead of trial. He asked the high court to make its writ permanent by severing Blaes' claims from the underlying case and transferring his case back to St. Louis County—the proper venue.

“Otherwise, what you are doing is putting ahead the efficiencies purportedly gained from joinder ahead of protecting the rights of the parties to litigate the case without prejudice,” he said. Weaver, the group leader of his firm's appellate practice, convinced a Missouri Court of Appeals panel to reverse the $72 million talc verdict in October.

In the Blaes appeal, Weaver is relying in part on a concurring opinion that was part of the Missouri Supreme Court's Sept. 12 ruling in Barron v. Abbott. The appeal involved a $38 million verdict in a case involving a Minnesota woman who alleged her baby was born with birth defects after she took the anti-epileptic drug Depakote while pregnant. Her claims joined more than a dozen other non-Missouri plaintiffs in a case that went to trial in St. Louis.

Abbott Laboratories challenged the verdict on several grounds, including venue and joinder, which the majority's opinion denied. In a concurring opinion, Judge Paul Wilson, backed by two of the five other judges on the Missouri Supreme Court, found that the trial judge should have severed the claims of nonresident plaintiffs once their cases approached trial, but he affirmed the majority's holding due to Abbott's “ambiguous” severance arguments.

On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court heard Abbott's arguments in another writ of prohibition granted in the same Depakote case involving a different plaintiff. Weaver's Armstrong Teasdale colleague, former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Ray Price, argued that the St. Louis judge overseeing the case should have severed the plaintiff's claims.