The teams of Kline & Specter and Arnold & Itkin have been a force to be reckoned with in the Philadelphia Roundup litigation.

Together the two firms have represented plaintiffs in nearly half of the cases to go to trial in the mass tort and have been behind the highest Roundup verdicts to come out of the city so far.

But former Kline & Specter associate Thomas Bosworth contends it is time for other attorneys in the litigation to get a shot at trial.

Bosworth, who started his own firm after his contentious split with Kline & Specter, requested in a Nov. 8 petition that the court put him next in line to bring his Roundup case before a Philadelphia jury.

“Despite there being over 200 Roundup cases pending in this court,” Bosworth asserted, “all of the Roundup cases selected for trial thus far have been tried by a handful of plaintiffs’ lawyers, some of whom have tried two cases before other law firms—including undersigned counsel—have had the opportunity to try any of their clients’ cases.”

Six Philadelphia Roundup cases have gone to verdict since trials began a little over a year ago, and a seventh trial is on track to close in the next week or so.

Of those seven cases, the team of Philadelphia’s Kline & Specter and Houston-based Arnold & Itkin has led the plaintiffs team in three. Other Texas personal injury firms have worked with Feldman & Pinto to helm the four remaining trials: Williams Hart & Boundas and Kirkendall Dwyer each tried one case, and Clark, Love & Hutson is currently trying its second.

According to Feldman Pinto’s Rosemary Pinto—who serves as co-liaison counsel for the Philadelphia Roundup plaintiffs alongside Kline & Specter’s Thomas Kline—three Roundup cases that have completed case-specific discovery are set to be scheduled for the next round of trials.

“This schedule, as well as any future trial settings, are squarely within the province of Judge Roberts,” Pinto said in an email, referring to the head of the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas’ Complex Litigation Center, Judge Joshua Roberts. Pinto did not respond to additional questions about what specific cases were marked for trial.

The court had assigned the first six trial slots by law firm in a February 2023 case management order and added the seventh trial in a later order.

Bosworth contended in his Nov. 8 filing that during the scheduling process he struggled to obtain information from plaintiffs liaison counsel about how cases were being selected for trial. Bosworth asserted that he eventually sent a letter to Pinto expressing concerns that “plaintiffs’ liaison counsel were not truly alternating between all lawyers and law firms but, rather, certain lawyers and law firms’ cases were being given unfair/recycled preference.”

Bosworth claimed plaintiffs liaison counsel did not adequately answer his inquiries about future case scheduling, prompting him to seek court intervention in the form of his Nov. 8 petition to intervene. The petition asks the court to allow Bosworth to attend a Tuesday afternoon Roundup status conference and to schedule his first-filed Roundup case for the mass tort’s next trial slot.

As of Tuesday morning, the court had not yet ruled on his petition.

“When you're not in the liaison group, you rely on them to situate your client’s case for trial in a fair way,” Bosworth said in an interview. “I just want my clients to be treated the same way as everyone else's clients,” he contended.

Bosworth said he currently has two cases in the Roundup mass tort, as well as a handful of other cases that have not yet been filed. He said he does not know if other law firms have expressed concerns with the way trials have been scheduled in the litigation.

A spokesperson for Monsanto, the primary defendant in the mass tort, declined to comment.

Kline & Specter has played a significant role in shaping the Philadelphia Roundup litigation, and Bosworth’s assertions of unfairness in trial scheduling come at a time when tensions are flaring between him and his former firm.

Bosworth filed his petition three days after Kline & Specter accused him of failing to comply with an August settlement that had been meant to resolve the sprawling legal dispute between him and the firm.