Published July 23, 2026
In early 2025, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation issued an order consolidating 27 federal Depo-Provera lawsuits — previously scattered across eight different federal districts — into a single new multidistrict litigation, MDL No. 3140, In re: Depo-Provera (Depot Medroxyprogesterone Acetate) Products Liability Litigation. The cases were centralized before U.S. District Judge M. Casey Rodgers in the Northern District of Florida. All of the consolidated lawsuits share a common core allegation: that the injectable contraceptive, or its generic equivalents, can cause users to develop meningioma, a tumor that forms in the tissue surrounding the brain or spinal cord.
What started as 27 cases has grown substantially since. By mid-2026, legal industry tracking put the number of pending cases in the MDL at well over 5,000, a dramatic increase from the litigation's starting point roughly a year and a half earlier.
An MDL doesn't merge individual lawsuits into one case — each plaintiff's claim remains its own case for purposes of trial or settlement — but it centralizes pretrial work like discovery and expert evidence rulings before a single judge, which avoids duplicating that work across every federal court where a case might otherwise be filed. The court entered an initial case management order in February 2025 and, the following month, a direct-filing order allowing new plaintiffs to file straight into the MDL rather than filing elsewhere and waiting to be transferred in — a procedural change that made it considerably easier for the case count to grow as quickly as it did.
This consolidation set the stage for the developments that followed: the FDA's December 2025 decision to add a meningioma warning to the Depo-Provera label, and the global settlement framework Pfizer negotiated with plaintiffs' lead counsel in 2026, both covered separately by Atumio. If you used Depo-Provera and were later diagnosed with a meningioma, see Atumio's Depo-Provera case page for a free case review, or start your case review directly.