Hair Relaxer Bellwether Trial Date Set: First MDL 3060 Trial Starts September 7, 2027

The first hair relaxer bellwether trial date is Tuesday 7 September 2027: a notification of docket entry in MDL No. 3060 on Thursday 24 September 2026 set the opening of the first federal jury trial over claims that chemical straighteners caused uterine, endometrial and ovarian cancer, and scheduled eight monthly case management conferences to get there. It is the first firm trial date in a Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) that has been pending since February 2023 and now holds 12,129 cases, but it is conditional on a ruling the court has not yet made: the defendants' joint motion to exclude the plaintiffs' General Causation experts, which could end the federal litigation before any jury is sworn.

The order changes the planning horizon for every lawyer with a hair relaxer inventory. Until last week, the honest answer to "when is the first trial?" was "sometime in 2027, on no verifiable docket entry," and intake pages filled the gap with dates that had no order behind them, most commonly January 2027. The hair relaxer bellwether trial date now has an anchor. What it does not have yet is a plaintiff, a ruling on the science, or a settlement track, and each of those shapes what the date is actually worth.

When is the first hair relaxer bellwether trial?

The first hair relaxer bellwether trial is scheduled to begin on 7 September 2027 before U.S. District Judge Mary M. Rowland in the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago. The date was entered through a notification of docket entry on 24 September 2026 in In re Hair Relaxer Marketing, Sales Practices, and Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3060, No. 1:23-cv-00818, according to litigation trackers monitoring the docket, including AboutLawsuits and the Lawsuit Information Center.

Seven September 2027 is the Tuesday after Labor Day, which falls on Monday 6 September that year. The start is 348 days after the order was entered and 1,674 days, roughly four years and seven months, after the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) centralized the federal cases before Judge Rowland on 6 February 2023. That interval is long even by the standards of large product MDLs, and the reasons for it are set out below.

The order does not name the case that will be tried. Reporting on the entry is explicit that the court has not yet announced which of the bellwether plaintiffs will go first, and nothing in the public record indicates whether the court intends a single-plaintiff trial or a consolidated one. Both points matter for anyone trying to predict the verdict's reach, and both remain open.

What the 24 September order sets, and what it leaves open

The substance of the order is a calendar. Between now and the trial, the court will convene the parties once a month from January through August 2027, each time on a Thursday, to deal with discovery disputes, expert issues, motion practice and trial logistics.

Date	Event	Days before trial
Thursday 28 January 2027	Case management conference	222
Thursday 25 February 2027	Case management conference	194
Thursday 25 March 2027	Case management conference	166
Thursday 22 April 2027	Case management conference	138
Thursday 27 May 2027	Case management conference	103
Thursday 24 June 2027	Case management conference	75
Thursday 29 July 2027	Case management conference	40
Thursday 26 August 2027	Final case management conference before trial	12
Tuesday 7 September 2027	First bellwether trial begins	0

Two features of that calendar deserve attention. First, the conferences begin in late January, not in the autumn of 2026. That leaves a four-month stretch in which the court's work is written rather than oral: the pending Rule 702 motion, case-specific expert discovery, and the first rounds of case-specific Daubert Challenge and summary judgment briefing. Second, the final conference falls only 12 days before trial. A court that sets its last pretrial conference that close to jury selection is signaling that it expects motions in limine, deposition designations and jury questionnaires to be resolved on paper in the weeks before, with the conference reserved for the last disputes.

What the order leaves open is more consequential than what it fixes:

• The plaintiff. No case has been designated for the first trial.
• The format. Nothing public indicates whether the first trial will involve one plaintiff or several.
• The sequence. No second or third trial date has been reported. A bellwether program with one date is a trial, not yet a program.
• The science. The general causation ruling, on which the entire federal docket depends, has not been issued and has no public hearing date.

Which hair relaxer case will be tried first?

No hair relaxer case has been selected for the 7 September 2027 trial, and the court has not said when it will choose. The candidates come from a trial pool that Judge Rowland selected herself. After a 32-case discovery pool was worked up, and after the court rejected the parties' proposed picks, she chose ten cases filed by Bridget Boatwright, Carrie Chattman, Charlene Fennell, Gloria Ford, Areecia Jackson, Joanne Jones, Rosa Robinson, Karla Smith, Roxanna Wade and Janette Wallace.

Her criteria tell practitioners what kind of case she wants a jury to hear. The pool was limited to lawsuits naming at least three defendants, and it excluded plaintiffs with memory loss or certain mental health or learning conditions, and women simultaneously pursuing talc cancer claims for similar reproductive cancers. Those exclusions are designed to keep the jury's attention on the products and the science rather than on the plaintiff's credibility or on a competing exposure. The multi-defendant requirement ensures that a verdict tests more than one manufacturer's warnings and more than one product line, which is what makes a bellwether result portable across an inventory in which most plaintiffs used several brands over many years.

There is a discrepancy in the public record that anyone advising clients should know about. Litigation trackers reported on 17 September 2026 that the court had narrowed the working bellwether pool from ten cases to five, with companion rulings limiting which plaintiffs could present economic damages. Coverage of the 24 September trial order describes the ten court-selected cases as the pool from which the first trial will be drawn and does not mention a five-case cut. Both reports may be accurate, since a court can keep ten cases in the pool while prioritizing five for trial preparation, but the difference is not resolved by anything retrievable outside the docket. Neither the ten nor any five have been publicly ranked.

Practitioners should expect the first-trial designation to come after the Rule 702 ruling and after the case-specific dispositive motions are decided, because a court does not want to name a case that then falls on Specific Causation or Product Identification grounds. On the published schedule, that points to a designation in the spring of 2027, which would align with the April or May conference.

Why won't the first hair relaxer trial happen until September 2027?

Because the schedule still has three layers of motion practice to clear, and because the court chose to give them room rather than compress them. The hair relaxer bellwether trial date sits at the end of a sequence in which each step has to be finished before the next is meaningful.

The general causation gate. The defendants' joint motion under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 to exclude the plaintiffs' general causation experts was filed on 5 May 2026 and fully briefed on 16 June 2026. As of 29 September 2026 it has been under submission for 105 days, with a hearing still to be set. General Causation asks whether chemical relaxers are capable of causing uterine, endometrial or ovarian cancer at all; the question is decided once, on a common record, and binds every case in the MDL. If the experts are excluded, summary judgment across the docket follows and no trial takes place. No court sets a firm trial date on the assumption that it will grant a motion of that kind, so the date is best read as the court's working assumption that at least some of the plaintiffs' general causation evidence will reach a jury, though it is not a ruling.

Case-specific expert and dispositive practice. Published schedules put the close of case-specific expert discovery for the bellwether cases in mid-November 2026, with dispositive and case-specific Daubert motions following and briefing running into February 2027. Sources disagree on whether 16 November or 16 December 2026 is the dispositive-motion deadline, and practitioners working on those filings should confirm from the docket. On either reading, the court will not have fully briefed case-specific motions until early 2027 and will need weeks to decide them.

The Second Wave defendants. A group of later-added manufacturers, reported to include Advanced Beauty Systems, Bronner Bros., Dudley Beauty, John Paul Mitchell Systems, Murray's Worldwide and Wella, was protected by a discovery stay from December 2025 until Judge Rowland lifted it on 27 July 2026. Case Management Order No. 24 keeps general discovery against that group open through 15 July 2027, and the outstanding interrogatory answers and document production responses under that order are due today, 29 September 2026. The first trial starts 54 days after that discovery closes. The court did not need to wait for the Second Wave record to try a case against the original defendants, but the date it chose means the Second Wave discovery will be complete, or nearly so, before a jury hears evidence.

Trial logistics. A multi-defendant product liability trial in which the jury will hear competing epidemiologists, toxicologists and gynecologic oncologists typically runs several weeks. A September start after the summer allows the court to block time in its calendar without colliding with holiday recesses, and places the verdict, if the case is tried to completion, in the fourth quarter of 2027.

What has to happen before the hair relaxer bellwether trial date?

The road to trial has six discrete milestones, not all of which have fixed dates. The table below separates what is scheduled from what is only expected.

Step	Date	Status	Why it matters
Second Wave defendants' interrogatory and document responses	29 September 2026	Due today	Starts the record against later-added manufacturers
Close of case-specific expert discovery on the bellwether cases	Mid-November 2026 (sources vary)	Scheduled	Fixes the experts each side can use at trial
Rule 702 general causation ruling	Not scheduled; hearing to be set	Pending	Decides whether any case can be tried
Case-specific Daubert and summary judgment motions	16 November or 16 December 2026 (sources split); briefing into February 2027	Scheduled	Removes cases from the pool that cannot survive
Designation of the first trial case	Not scheduled; likely spring 2027	Expected	Determines which products, brands and cancer type the jury sees
Monthly case management conferences	28 January to 26 August 2027	Scheduled	Venue for motions in limine, designations, logistics
Close of general discovery against Second Wave defendants (CMO No. 24)	15 July 2027	Scheduled	54 days before trial
First bellwether trial	7 September 2027	Scheduled	First federal jury verdict

The general causation ruling is the only item on the list that can end the program rather than shape it. It is also the only item with no date. The Rule 702 standard was tightened by the December 2023 amendments, which clarified that the proponent of expert testimony must show admissibility by a preponderance of the evidence and that the expert's opinion must reflect a reliable application of method to facts. MDL courts have been applying that standard more rigorously since, and the hair relaxer defendants' motion is framed around it: they argue that the epidemiology is observational, that the associations do not survive confounding adjustment, that no dose-response relationship has been shown, and that the plaintiffs' experts reason backward from the conclusion.

Two comparison MDLs show the range of outcomes. In the Depo-Provera litigation, a pending general causation ruling coexisted with settlement negotiations that produced a master settlement agreement in July 2026. In the GLP-1 litigation, the court scheduled a multi-day evidentiary hearing on Rule 702 for September 2026 rather than deciding the motions on the papers. Judge Rowland has not signaled which course she will follow, though she held a Science Day on 8 January 2026 with state-court judges in attendance, a sign that she expects her evidentiary rulings to be read well beyond Chicago.

The "January 2027" claim and other dates the order overtakes

The 24 September order resolves a confusion that ran through much of the hair relaxer coverage in 2026. Several plaintiff-side intake pages had stated that the first federal trial would take place in January 2027, without citing an order; some tracker pages said, correctly until last week, that no trial date had been set; others described trials as expected "no earlier than 2027." The September 2027 date replaces all of them. Any client communication, marketing page or case-valuation memo still referring to a January 2027 federal trial is now wrong and should be corrected.

The order also overtakes the earlier bellwether architecture. In 2025 the court had ordered each side to nominate 20 cases, producing a 40-case pool that shrank to 32 after strikes. Early projections from that stage pointed to trials in late 2026 or early 2027. The trajectory since has been one of consolidation of control by the bench (the court rejecting the parties' picks and choosing ten itself) and of the calendar slipping by roughly nine months against those early projections.

That slippage is not unusual. In the Paragard IUD litigation, MDL No. 2974 in the Northern District of Georgia, the first bellwether ended in a defense verdict for Teva on 3 February 2026, and the second, Robere v. Teva, originally set for 28 September 2026, was moved in July to 12 April 2027. Bellwether dates are commitments, not guarantees, and the hair relaxer date will be tested by the same forces: the Rule 702 ruling, attrition in the pool, and whether settlement talks produce a reason to adjourn.

How many hair relaxer lawsuits are pending?

As of the JPML's report dated 1 September 2026, 12,129 actions were pending in MDL No. 3060, up 350 from 11,779 a month earlier and from 11,877 in the report of 1 July 2026. That makes it one of the largest active product liability MDLs in the federal system. Broader claim counts cited by trackers, which include unfiled claims held by firms and cases pending in state courts, run higher, with some reports putting the total above 32,000 claims; that figure is not a court statistic and should not be treated as one.

State courts run parallel dockets. Plaintiff-side trackers report 44 cases consolidated in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, before Judge Patrick T. Stanton, with 20 cases consolidated in Chatham County, Georgia, and others pending in DeKalb County. Those state dockets are not bound by the federal calendar and could, in principle, produce a verdict before 7 September 2027. No state trial date has been confirmed in any source that could be corroborated.

Georgia's docket was reshaped by the Supreme Court of Georgia's unanimous decision in Burroughs v. Strength of Nature Global, LLC on 15 October 2025. Writing for the court, Justice Andrew Pinson held that the "first sale" that starts Georgia's ten-year products liability Statute of Repose is the retail sale to the consumer, so that for a plaintiff who used many products over many years, the clock runs separately for each purchase. The holding revived claims by long-term users that the Court of Appeals had treated as time-barred, and it is the kind of state-law variable that interacts with the federal calendar: a Georgia plaintiff whose most recent purchases were within ten years retains a state-court option regardless of the MDL's pace.

The science the first jury will hear

The claims rest on a body of observational research linking frequent use of chemical straighteners to hormone-sensitive reproductive cancers, and on the presence in some products of endocrine-active constituents such as phthalates and parabens and, in some straightening products, formaldehyde or formaldehyde-releasing chemicals. The centerpiece is an analysis of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences' Sister Study, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on 17 October 2022.

The study followed 33,497 U.S. women aged 35 to 74 for almost eleven years, during which 378 uterine cancer cases were diagnosed. Frequent users, meaning participants who had straightened their hair more than four times in the year before enrollment, had over double the uterine cancer risk of women who had never used the products. The authors estimated that 1.64% of women who never used straighteners would develop uterine cancer by age 70, against 4.05% of frequent users. No association was found for hair dyes, bleach, highlights or perms. The National Institutes of Health reported that approximately 60% of the participants who had used straighteners in the previous year identified as Black women, which is why the litigation's plaintiffs are overwhelmingly Black women.

The defense case against that evidence is the standard one for a single large cohort: association is not causation, the absolute number of cases is modest, product use was self-reported without brand or formulation detail, and residual confounding cannot be excluded. That is why the Rule 702 ruling matters so much. A court that admits the plaintiffs' general causation experts will leave those arguments for the jury; a court that excludes them will decide the litigation on the admissibility of the science.

What cancers are covered by hair relaxer lawsuits?

The federal bellwether pool is confined to uterine cancer, including endometrial cancer, and ovarian cancer. Other conditions pleaded in the wider inventory, including uterine fibroids and hysterectomy claims, are being pursued mainly in state-court programs and are not part of the federal bellwether track. The first federal jury in September 2027 will therefore hear a cancer case, and its verdict will speak most directly to the uterine, endometrial and ovarian claims that make up the bulk of the MDL.

The regulatory backdrop has not moved in the plaintiffs' favor or against them. The Food and Drug Administration's proposed rule to ban formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing chemicals in hair smoothing and straightening products has been on the agency's regulatory agenda since 2023 and has missed a series of target dates, most recently an action date of 31 December 2025, after earlier targets of October 2023, April 2024, November 2024, March 2025 and July 2025. The agency has said the rule remains a priority. A proposed rule, if published before September 2027, would be admissible or excludable on the usual grounds, but it would change the public conversation in which the jury is selected.

Does the Arizona attorney general's lawsuit against L'Oréal affect the hair relaxer MDL?

Not directly, but it adds a second front on a different clock. In September 2026, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a consumer fraud lawsuit, State of Arizona ex rel. Mayes v. L'Oréal USA, Inc., in the Superior Court of Arizona for Maricopa County against L'Oréal USA, its parent company and SoftSheen-Carson. The complaint is dated 10 September 2026 and the office announced it the following day. Arizona is the first state to sue a cosmetics company over hair relaxer cancer warnings.

The state alleges that the companies advertised and sold chemical relaxers under brands including Dark and Lovely, Optimum and Mizani while failing to tell consumers that the formulations contained likely carcinogens and had been associated in research with elevated ovarian and uterine cancer risk, and that the products were marketed primarily to Black women and in some cases to children. The state asks the court to bar sales of certain relaxers unless they carry clear cancer warnings. L'Oréal has said it is confident in the safety of SoftSheen-Carson's products and that the allegations have neither legal nor scientific merit. DiCello Levitt has announced that it is working with the attorney general's office on the case.

Three features of the Arizona action matter for MDL practitioners:

• It does not need to prove causation. A consumer fraud claim turns on whether the marketing was deceptive or omitted a material fact, not on whether the product caused a particular plaintiff's cancer. The state can therefore litigate the warnings question without clearing the Rule 702 gate that the MDL must clear.
• It can move on its own schedule. A state enforcement action in Maricopa County is not coordinated with the federal MDL and is not bound by its calendar. Discovery rulings, or a resolution with warning commitments, could come before 7 September 2027.
• It invites imitation. A first state action by an attorney general, prosecuted with private-firm support, is often followed by others. Additional state actions would increase the pressure on defendants to resolve the private inventory on a timetable that the bellwether date alone would not create.

It does not bind the federal court, it does not add claimants to the MDL, and nothing it produces is automatically admissible in the bellwether trial.

Who are the defendants the first jury will hear about?

The original defendant group, the one on the trial track, is built around the manufacturers whose products dominate the Product Identification evidence in the federal inventory: L'Oréal USA and its SoftSheen-Carson unit, Revlon, Strength of Nature, and the Namaste and Dabur entities. The brands most frequently identified include Dark & Lovely, Optimum, Mizani, Creme of Nature, Just for Me, Motions, African Pride, TCB and ORS Olive Oil. Because the court limited the bellwether pool to cases naming at least three defendants, the first jury will almost certainly hear evidence about the labeling, testing and marketing of several of these companies at once, and will be asked to apportion fault among them if it finds liability.

That multi-defendant structure has practical consequences at trial. Each defendant will want to point to the others' products as the more likely exposure, each will run its own cross-examination of the plaintiff's experts, and the verdict form will need to separate failure-to-warn findings by manufacturer. Complex verdict forms produce appealable issues, and a first verdict that is appealed on apportionment grounds carries less settlement weight until the appeal is resolved. The monthly conferences in the summer of 2027 are where those verdict-form disputes will be fought.

The Second Wave defendants (Advanced Beauty Systems, Bronner Bros., Dudley Beauty, John Paul Mitchell Systems, Murray's Worldwide and Wella, among others reported) will not be defendants at the first trial unless a bellwether plaintiff named them and the court keeps them in, which the schedule makes unlikely.

What a bellwether verdict does and does not decide

A Bellwether Trial decides one plaintiff's case. The verdict is not binding on any other claimant in MDL No. 3060, it does not establish liability for the inventory, and it does not fix a value for any other case. What it does is produce information: how a Chicago federal jury responds to the Sister Study and the defense's criticisms of it, how jurors weigh warnings that were absent against a regulatory backdrop in which the FDA has not acted, and what a plaintiff with a documented cancer diagnosis and multi-brand use history is worth to a jury.

Courts and commentators generally regard a single verdict as a weak signal and a series as a strong one. That is why the absence of a second and third date matters. If the 7 September 2027 trial produces a large plaintiff verdict, defendants will argue that one result from a court-selected case does not represent the inventory; if it produces a defense verdict, plaintiffs will make the mirror-image argument. The value of a bellwether program comes from repetition, and so far only one trial has a date. Practitioners should watch the 2027 conferences for the scheduling of a second trial, which would turn a single test into a program.

Is there a hair relaxer settlement yet?

No. There is no Global Settlement, no Settlement Matrix, no claims program and no court-approved compensation figure in the hair relaxer litigation as of 29 September 2026. Any page quoting average payouts or settlement ranges is offering estimates, not reporting a settlement. The court has encouraged the parties to narrow disputed issues, and when it lifted the Second Wave discovery stay on 27 July 2026, it concluded that the settlement discussions then under way did not justify keeping the stay in place, a signal that talks had not reached a stage the court considered close to resolution.

A firm trial date changes the negotiating calendar even before a verdict. In most large MDLs the period between the setting of a first trial date and the swearing of the jury is when defendants assess their exposure most concretely, because trial preparation costs become real and the risk of an adverse verdict becomes datable. The same logic applies here, subject to one large exception: until the Rule 702 ruling issues, the defendants hold an option that could end the case, and rational defendants rarely pay full value for claims while that option is live.

Recent first verdicts show the range of outcomes a first bellwether can produce. In the Bard implanted port catheter litigation, MDL No. 3081, a federal jury in Arizona returned a $40 million compensatory verdict for the plaintiff in Divelbliss on 4 September 2026, finding Design Defect and Failure to Warn and declining to award Punitive Damages. It was the first plaintiff verdict in that litigation. In the Paragard litigation, the first bellwether produced a defense verdict. Either result in September 2027 would set the reference point for every subsequent negotiation in MDL 3060, and the composition of the verdict (economic versus non-economic, compensatory versus punitive) would matter as much as the number.

What the hair relaxer bellwether trial date means for claimants' counsel, defendants and funders

For claimants' counsel. The hair relaxer bellwether trial date gives firms a date against which to plan, but it also lengthens the horizon for clients who have been told that trials were imminent. Client communications should be updated to reflect a September 2027 trial, contingent on the general causation ruling, with no settlement in place. Firms should confirm that every filed case is current on its Plaintiff Fact Sheet (PFS) obligations, because courts approaching a first trial routinely use deficiency orders to clean up inventories, and a case dismissed for PFS default in the spring of 2027 will not participate in whatever follows the verdict. Firms whose clients' Product Identification rests principally on Second Wave brands should note that those defendants are not on the trial track and that their general discovery runs until 15 July 2027. Firms with Georgia clients should assess Burroughs on a purchase-by-purchase basis before relying on a state-court alternative.

For defendants. The date concentrates exposure in the Rule 702 ruling. If the motion is denied, the period between the ruling and the trial becomes the window in which the defendants' willingness to resolve the inventory will be tested, and the monthly conference calendar ensures that the court will be watching. Defendants facing the Arizona consumer fraud action also face the prospect of warning-related findings in a forum that does not require causation proof, and should expect plaintiffs' counsel in the MDL to monitor that docket closely for discovery rulings and documents.

For litigation funders. Third-Party Litigation Funding priced on a 2026 or early-2027 trial now carries a longer duration. Portfolio-level models should add roughly nine months to the time to first verdict relative to the early projections and should treat the Rule 702 ruling as a binary event with no fixed date. Funders active in MDL 3060 should also note the increasing volume of disclosure requirements at the state level, which can affect how interests in a hair relaxer portfolio are documented.

For Second Wave defendants. The trial date sits 54 days after the close of general discovery against them, which gives them the benefit of watching the general causation ruling and the first verdict before their own exposure is tested. It also means that documents produced under Case Management Order No. 24 through July 2027 could surface in the pretrial record if they bear on industry knowledge, so the separation between the two tracks is less complete than the schedule suggests.

FAQ

When is the first hair relaxer bellwether trial?

The first federal hair relaxer bellwether trial is scheduled to begin on Tuesday 7 September 2027 in the Northern District of Illinois before Judge Mary M. Rowland, under a notification of docket entry in MDL No. 3060 on 24 September 2026. Eight monthly case management conferences, all on Thursdays, are set from 28 January through 26 August 2027.

Which hair relaxer case will be tried first?

The court has not selected the first case. It will come from the bellwether pool of ten cases the judge chose herself from a 32-case discovery pool (filed by Boatwright, Chattman, Fennell, Ford, Jackson, Jones, Robinson, Smith, Wade and Wallace), which trackers reported was narrowed to five for trial preparation on 17 September 2026.

How many hair relaxer lawsuits are pending?

The JPML reported 12,129 actions pending in MDL No. 3060 as of 1 September 2026, an increase of 350 in one month. Additional cases are pending in state courts, including consolidated dockets in Cook County, Illinois, and in Georgia.

Is there a hair relaxer settlement yet?

No. There is no global settlement, settlement matrix or claims program as of 29 September 2026, and no court has approved any compensation figure. Published payout ranges are estimates, not settlement terms.

What cancers are covered by hair relaxer lawsuits?

The federal bellwether cases involve uterine cancer, including endometrial cancer, and ovarian cancer. Fibroid and hysterectomy claims are being pursued mainly in state courts and are outside the federal bellwether track.

Can new hair relaxer lawsuits still be filed?

New cases continue to be filed; the MDL grew by 350 cases between August and September 2026. Whether a particular claim is timely depends on the governing state's Statute of Limitations, discovery rule and any statute of repose, which, after Burroughs in Georgia, may run separately for each retail purchase. Nothing in the trial order closes the MDL to new filings.