Judge Vince Chhabria of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Monsanto Co.'s request to reverse an $80 million verdict over its herbicide Roundup appeared unlikely after a federal judge told lawyers Tuesday that there was evidence at trial supporting punitive damages.

At a hearing Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said he was unlikely to keep $2 million in future non-economic damages or the entire $75 million in punitive damages. But he insisted that Monsanto's conduct, as demonstrated at trial, justified some amount of punitive damages.

“There's a fair amount of evidence about Monsanto being pretty crass about this issue,” Chhabria said. “There's a fair amount of evidence that the only thing Monsanto cared about was undermining the people who were raising concerns about whether Roundup caused cancer. Monsanto didn't seem concerned at all about getting at the truth of whether glyphosate caused cancer.”

A jury awarded the verdict March 27 for California resident Edwin Hardeman. The trial was the second involving claims that Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma, with a trial last year ending in a $289 million verdict in San Francisco Superior Court, later reduced to $78 million. A third jury, in Alameda County Superior Court, came out with a $2 billion verdict May 13. Monsanto has appealed the other two verdicts.

Monsanto's parent company, Bayer AG, asked to reverse the $80 million verdict, the first in the multidistrict litigation, or grant the company a new trial. Its lawyers claim scientific evidence and regulatory findings found that Roundup's key ingredient, glyphosate, does not cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma and challenged several of Chhabria's evidentiary rulings.

Ahead of Tuesday's hearing, Chhabria issued guidance to the lawyers to focus their arguments on the non-economic compensatory damages, punitive damages and the jury's instruction on the failure-to-warn claim.

At the hearing, the judge asked numerous questions about whether he could order a new trial on non-economic damages. He also asked what the ratio should be between compensatory damages and punitive damages.

“I believe that the jury's conclusion that Monsanto deserves punitive damages is supportable, and I don't need to hear any argument to the contrary,” he said, noting there was no evidence of emails during trial showing Monsanto employees discussing concerns about potential cancer risks. But the ratio between punitive damages and compensatory damages should be in the single digits, requiring some reduction.

“I believe this is not a case where Monsanto's conduct was so outrageous that the punitive damages award should not be reduced, so I don't need to hear argument to that effect, either,” he said.

Unlike the state court trials, Chhabria bifurcated Hardeman's trial to focus on the scientific evidence first. Last year, he expressed skepticism about the scientific evidence that plaintiffs attorneys planned to introduce at trial.

He also sanctioned Hardeman's lead trial counsel, Aimee Wagstaff of Andrus Wagstaff in Lakewood, Colorado, for violations of his pretrial orders during her opening argument. He later added Jennifer Moore, of the Moore Law Group in Louisville, Kentucky, to his sanctions order, which required the lawyers to each pay $500.

Moore and Wagstaff have appealed the sanctions order.