Paraquat Litigation Funding Disclosure: MDL Judge Orders Smith Law Firm to Reveal Who Funds Its Cases

The federal judge running the paraquat Parkinson's disease litigation has ordered a plaintiffs' lawyer to disclose who is funding his cases. On Wednesday, October 14, 2026, Chief Judge Nancy J. Rosenstengel of the Southern District of Illinois directed R. Allen Smith of The Smith Law Firm to reveal outside financial interests in his paraquat inventory, after finding that only 49 of his 750 clients had joined the Syngenta and Chevron settlement. The order ties litigation funding disclosure directly to the question of who is really deciding whether plaintiffs settle, a step beyond the conflict-screening orders federal MDL courts have used before.

The paraquat litigation funding disclosure order did not come alone. The judge also required Smith to attend fortnightly conferences at which she can speak with each of his roughly 700 opt-out clients, and gave him 14 days to produce Plaintiff Fact Sheets for those clients and schedule their depositions. Taken together, the measures move the court's months-long inquiry into concentrated opt-outs from the question "did these clients understand their offers?" to a sharper one: "does anyone other than the client and the lawyer have a stake in the answer?"

What did the paraquat judge order on October 14, 2026?

The paraquat judge ordered three things on October 14, 2026: disclosure of who is funding Smith's cases, Smith's attendance at fortnightly conferences where the court can speak to each opt-out client, and production of opt-out clients' Plaintiff Fact Sheets with depositions set within 14 days. Law360 reported the order the same evening; Law.com followed on October 15 with the client figures and the judge's own explanation.

Each piece does different work:

• Funding disclosure. Smith must reveal who is funding his paraquat cases. Law.com's headline describes the target as "financial interests" in the lawsuits, which is broader than a single lender: it can reach any person or entity outside the attorney-client relationship that stands to be paid from recoveries.
• Fortnightly conferences. Smith must begin attending conferences every two weeks so the court can speak with each of his opt-out clients individually. The format is unusual. In most MDLs the court addresses lead counsel and liaison counsel, not individual represented plaintiffs.
• Fourteen-day discovery clock. Smith must produce a Plaintiff Fact Sheet (PFS) for each client opting out of the settlement and set those clients' depositions within 14 days. Earlier in the year, the court had applied PFS and deposition deadlines only to a random sample of opt-outs; reporting on the October 14 order describes the obligation as running to Smith's opting-out clients generally.

The reported coverage does not say whether the funding disclosure is to be filed on the public docket, submitted to the court alone, or shared with the defendants, and it does not give a separate deadline for the funding disclosure itself. Those details will matter, and they are addressed below.

Who is the lawyer ordered to disclose funding in the paraquat MDL?

The lawyer is R. Allen Smith of The Smith Law Firm, PLLC, a Mississippi plaintiffs' firm with one of the largest paraquat inventories in In re: Paraquat Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3004. Law.com named Smith; Law360's initial report referred to "a plaintiffs' lawyer" whose roughly 700 clients had opted out of the global settlement.

Smith's firm was already one of the court's two principal targets. In a June 2, 2026 order, Judge Rosenstengel found that more than 90 percent of eligible Smith Law Firm clients and 100 percent of eligible DiCello Levitt LLP clients had refused their settlement offers, and selected about 10 percent of each firm's opt-out cases for early discovery. DiCello's situation then moved on a different track: after an August 27 hearing at which the court aired concerns about client notice and vetting, a September 11 order cancelled a planned in-person follow-up because of reported "substantial progress." No equivalent progress report has surfaced for Smith, and the October 14 order is the court's response.

No public statement from Smith or his firm on the order had been reported by October 16, 2026.

How many Smith Law Firm clients joined the paraquat settlement?

Only 49 of Smith's 750 paraquat clients were participating in the proposed settlement, according to the judge's remarks as reported by Law.com, a participation rate of about 6.5 percent. That leaves about 701 non-participating clients, which reconciles the two outlets' headline numbers: Law360's "700 opt-out plaintiffs" and Law.com's "750 clients" describe the same inventory from opposite ends.

Measure	Figure	Source
Smith Law Firm paraquat clients	750	Law.com, October 15, 2026
Clients participating in the settlement	49	Law.com, October 15, 2026
Non-participating clients (750 − 49)	About 701	Calculation
Participation rate	About 6.5 percent	Calculation
Eligible Smith clients refusing offers, June 2026	More than 90 percent	S.D. Ill. order, June 2, 2026
Eligible DiCello Levitt clients refusing offers, June 2026	100 percent	S.D. Ill. order, June 2, 2026
Eligible Nachawati Law Group clients refusing offers	183 of 217	S.D. Ill. order, June 3, 2026
Paraquat suits before Judge Rosenstengel	About 6,600 (6,602 pending per JPML)	Law.com; JPML report, October 1, 2026

Two cautions on the arithmetic. First, the June figures are percentages of eligible clients who received offers; the October figure of 49 participants is measured against Smith's whole paraquat book of 750, which may include clients who never qualified for an offer. The two ratios are therefore not strictly comparable, though they point the same way. Second, Smith's roughly 700 non-participants are large relative to the more than 900 refusals reported across the whole MDL in late September; on any reading, one firm now represents a dominant share of the holdouts.

Why did the paraquat judge order litigation funding disclosure?

The paraquat judge ordered litigation funding disclosure because she wants to know whether people other than the plaintiffs are influencing the decision to reject the settlement. "I want to be sure the decisions are made by the right people," Judge Rosenstengel said, according to Law.com, after noting her concern that only 49 of Smith's 750 clients were participating.

That sentence carries the whole theory of the order. Under the professional-conduct rules every state has adopted in some form, the decision whether to accept a settlement belongs to the client, not the lawyer (ABA Model Rule 1.2(a)). A lawyer may accept payment from a third party only if it does not interfere with the lawyer's independent professional judgment (Model Rule 1.8(f)), and may not let a person who pays the lawyer direct or regulate that judgment (Model Rule 5.4(c)). When one firm's clients decline offers at a rate far above everyone else's, a court has three candidate explanations:

1. Claim valuation. The firm genuinely believes its clients' claims are worth more at trial than the confidential settlement matrix pays, and its clients agree after informed advice.
2. Vetting problems. The firm's inventory includes clients who cannot document paraquat exposure or a Parkinson's diagnosis, who did not qualify or would not survive Claimant Vetting, and whose "opt-outs" mask weak claims.
3. Misaligned economics. Someone with a financial stake in the inventory, such as a funder, a referral partner, or the firm itself under a funding facility, would lose money if clients accepted the offers as structured, and that pressure is reaching the clients' decisions.

The June 2 sampling order and the special-master meetings tested the first two explanations. The October 14 funding disclosure order is the first instrument aimed at the third. That is why the order is notable even to practitioners outside paraquat: it treats Third-Party Litigation Funding not as a background fact about how mass tort inventories are financed, but as a potential explanation for a specific settlement outcome the court is responsible for managing.

How funding can change a settlement decision

The mechanics are not hypothetical. A portfolio funding facility advanced to a firm is commonly repaid from fees across the funded inventory, often with a minimum return or a multiple that rises over time. If the confidential matrix offers in a Global Settlement produce fees below what the firm owes its funder, the firm's economic interest may favor holding out for trial values, even where an individual client would rationally take the offer. Pre-settlement advances made directly to plaintiffs create a parallel problem: a client who owes a consumer funder a growing balance may see little net recovery from a modest settlement offer and therefore little reason to accept it. Neither scenario has been alleged in the paraquat docket. The point is that both are recognized patterns, and the disclosure order gives the court the information it needs to rule them in or out.

Paraquat claims have also been marketed to funders. Legal-Bay, a pre-settlement funder, announced on April 30, 2026 that it was accepting applications from paraquat plaintiffs. That press release establishes that consumer funding was available in this litigation; it says nothing about whether any Smith client used it.

How the court got here: from opt-out sampling to paraquat litigation funding disclosure

The October 14 order is the latest step in a supervised opt-out process that Judge Rosenstengel has built since the Master Settlement Agreement was signed. The sequence explains why funding disclosure arrived when it did.

Date	Event	What it did
April 17, 2024	Daubert ruling	Excluded plaintiffs' only General Causation expert and granted summary judgment in the first four bellwether cases; appeal later held in abeyance
April 2025	Settlement letter agreement	Syngenta, Chevron and plaintiffs' lead counsel disclosed a signed agreement to settle
September 3, 2025	Master Settlement Agreement	Executed for certain individual claims; terms confidential
March 2026	Qualified Settlement Fund	Court approved a Qualified Settlement Fund (QSF) to hold settlement money
April 8, 2026	Case Management Order No. 24	Administrators to report non-qualifiers and opt-outs, by firm, to Special Master Randi Ellis
June 2, 2026	Smith and DiCello order	Random ~10 percent sample of each firm's opt-outs sent to limited discovery: PFS in 14 days, depositions in 60
June 3, 2026	Nachawati order	Same sampling procedure after 183 of 217 eligible clients refused
June 12, 2026	Special-master meetings	Opt-outs to meet Special Master Ellis and certify an informed decision
August 24–27, 2026	DiCello hearing	Mark DiCello ordered to appear; court raised notice and vetting concerns
September 11, 2026	Follow-up cancelled	DiCello in-person hearing called off after a "substantial progress" report
Late Sept.–Oct. 2, 2026	Press reports	More than 900 total refusals reported; bellwether revival flagged
October 14, 2026	Smith order	Funding disclosure; fortnightly conferences with opt-outs; PFS and depositions in 14 days

The pattern is escalation by firm. The court first collected data by firm through the settlement administrators, then sampled, then required personal meetings with a Special Master, then summoned firm principals. With DiCello reportedly making progress and Smith's participation rate at about 6.5 percent, the court has now focused its most intrusive tools on the single largest holdout inventory.

Can an MDL judge require plaintiffs' lawyers to disclose litigation funding?

Yes, an MDL judge can require plaintiffs' lawyers to disclose litigation funding, and federal judges have done so before, but there is no national rule that compels it, so the authority rests on the court's case-management and supervisory powers. The paraquat order is unusual less for the disclosure itself than for its target (one firm) and its stated purpose (checking who controls settlement decisions).

The legal footing comes from several overlapping sources. A transferee court in a Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) has broad power under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16 to manage pretrial proceedings, including settlement; Rule 26(b)(1) permits discovery relevant to a party's claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case; and every federal court has inherent authority to supervise the lawyers who appear before it. New Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 16.1, the first rule written specifically for MDLs, took effect on December 1, 2025, and invites early attention to how the litigation will be managed, though its final text says nothing explicit about funding.

The existing federal models differ sharply in who sees the information:

Regime	Scope	What is disclosed	Who sees it
Judge Dan Polster, opioid MDL No. 2804 (N.D. Ohio), May 7, 2018	Counsel in one MDL with contingent third-party financing	Description of the financing plus sworn affirmations from counsel and lender that it creates no conflict of interest	The judge alone, ex parte and in camera
D.N.J. Local Civil Rule 7.1.1 (2021)	All civil cases in the district	Funder identity and a description of the funder's financial interest, filed within 30 days	Public filing; further discovery on good cause
N.D. Cal. Civil Local Rule 3-15	All civil cases in the district	Any person or entity with a financial interest in the subject matter or a party	Public certification
Chief Judge Colm Connolly standing order (D. Del., April 2022)	That judge's cases	Funder identity, financial interest, and whether funder approval is needed for litigation or settlement decisions	Filed with the court
Judge Rosenstengel, paraquat MDL No. 3004 (S.D. Ill.), October 14, 2026	One firm's paraquat inventory	Who is funding the cases / outside financial interests	Not stated in reporting

The closest precedent is Judge Polster's opioid order, the template most MDL judges cite. It defined third-party contingent litigation financing broadly, as an arrangement giving a non-attorney a right to compensation contingent on and sourced from MDL proceeds, and it kept disclosures out of the defendants' hands. Its rationale was conflicts: the court wanted assurance that financing did not compromise counsel's loyalty. Judge Rosenstengel's order shares that rationale but adds an empirical trigger. Judge Polster's order applied to everyone; the paraquat order applies to the firm whose clients' behavior the court could not otherwise explain.

That targeting cuts both ways on appeal risk. A firm-specific order is easier to justify as case management grounded in a record (participation data, sampled depositions, special-master reports) than a blanket requirement. It is also more stigmatizing, and Smith could argue it singles out a firm for zealously advising clients to reject offers they consider inadequate. Discovery and case-management orders are generally not immediately appealable, and mandamus is reserved for clear abuses, so the order is likely to stand unless the court expands it, for example by sharing funding terms with the defendants.

Will the paraquat litigation funding disclosure be made public?

Reporting on the October 14 order does not say whether the paraquat funding disclosure will be filed publicly, reviewed by the judge in camera, or shared with Syngenta and Chevron. That choice will determine the order's practical impact.

The precedents point toward in camera review. The court's stated concern is about who is making decisions for plaintiffs, a question about the integrity of the attorney-client relationship, not about the defendants' liability. The judge does not need the defendants to see a funding agreement to decide whether a funder holds consent rights over settlement or whether repayment terms create a conflict. Judge Polster reached exactly that conclusion in 2018, and the defendants in an inventory settlement have an obvious strategic interest in a holdout firm's funding economics: knowing the repayment floor tells them the minimum offer at which the firm can afford to recommend settlement.

On the other hand, the court has made the opt-out process unusually visible. Its orders naming firms and their refusal rates are posted publicly on the district's MDL page. If the disclosure reveals a funder with contractual influence over settlement, the court may conclude the parties and the Special Master need to see it in order to manage the holdout docket and any revived Bellwether Trial program. The safest assumption for counsel in other MDLs is that a funding disclosure made to a judge may not stay with the judge.

Can a litigation funder stop a plaintiff from accepting a settlement?

A litigation funder cannot lawfully stop a plaintiff from accepting a settlement under the professional-conduct rules, because the decision to settle belongs to the client, and a lawyer may not let a third-party payer direct the lawyer's judgment. But funding contracts can still create economic pressure, and that pressure is what courts and legislatures are now examining.

The formal rules are clear. Model Rule 1.2(a) requires a lawyer to abide by the client's decision whether to settle. Model Rule 1.8(f) bars accepting compensation from a third party unless the client gives informed consent and there is no interference with the lawyer's independence. Model Rule 5.4(c) prohibits a person who pays the lawyer from directing the lawyer's professional judgment. And where one lawyer negotiates a settlement for many clients, Model Rule 1.8(g) on aggregate settlements requires each client's informed consent after disclosure of the existence and nature of all the claims and the participation of each person in the settlement.

The practical picture is murkier. Commercial funding agreements sometimes give funders information rights or consultation rights over settlement, and consumer advances accrue charges that can consume much of a modest recovery. Several states have responded with statutes: Indiana and Louisiana bar funder control over litigation and settlement decisions and make funding agreements expressly discoverable, Montana prohibits funder influence, and New York's Consumer Litigation Funding Act bars funders from influencing litigation strategy or settlement decisions. At the federal level, the Litigation Funding Transparency Act of 2026 (S. 3826) would require disclosure of third-party funding in certain civil actions, and a coalition of 214 companies asked the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules in September 2026 to write a Rule 26 disclosure requirement. None of that binds the paraquat court, which is acting on its own authority.

The mass arbitration parallel

The paraquat order also highlights a gap on the other side of aggregate practice. In Mass Arbitration, claimants' counsel routinely file thousands of individual demands against a single respondent, often financed by the same kinds of portfolio funders that finance mass tort inventories. Yet neither the American Arbitration Association (AAA) mass arbitration supplementary rules nor the JAMS mass arbitration procedures require claimants or their counsel to disclose a funder. The provider rules police claimant identity and counsel's certification of filing information, not who stands behind the capital.

That asymmetry matters because the concern Judge Rosenstengel articulated, whether "the right people" are making settlement decisions, applies with equal force when a respondent offers a global deal to 20,000 arbitration claimants and one firm's clients refuse at a rate far above everyone else's. There is no transferee judge to call fortnightly conferences in arbitration. Respondents negotiating aggregate settlements of mass arbitrations should expect to cite the paraquat order when they argue, to providers or in court, that funding disclosure belongs in the mass filing rulebooks too.

What happens next for paraquat opt-out plaintiffs?

Paraquat opt-out plaintiffs represented by Smith now face a compressed schedule: Plaintiff Fact Sheets and depositions within 14 days of the October 14 order, regular court conferences at which the judge may address them directly, and a funding disclosure whose results could reshape how the court treats the whole holdout bloc. Opt-outs at other firms remain subject to the June orders, the special-master certification process, and the possibility of revived bellwether trials.

Several pressure points will determine the next few months:

• The 14-day deadline falls around October 28, 2026, counting from October 14. Missing PFS deadlines in MDLs commonly leads to show-cause orders and, eventually, dismissal motions, much as a Lone Pine Order does.
• The depositions will test exposure and diagnosis evidence under oath across a much larger slice of Smith's inventory than the June 10 percent sample did.
• The fortnightly conferences will give the court direct contact with clients, a process critics described to The New Lede in July as undue pressure on elderly plaintiffs with a progressive disease and the court frames as protecting informed consent.
• The funding disclosure will either confirm that Smith's clients are making unencumbered choices, strengthening the case that the holdouts reflect a valuation dispute, or reveal financial interests the court will want to examine further.
• General causation remains unresolved. The April 2024 Daubert Challenge ruling excluding the plaintiffs' only general-causation expert is on appeal to the Seventh Circuit and held in abeyance. Any holdout who goes to trial must clear that hurdle, either through reversal or new admissible expert testimony.

Plaintiffs who decide, after the conferences, to join the settlement presumably can still do so if the program's deadlines allow; the Master Settlement Agreement's terms, including any participation threshold or walk-away right, remain confidential.

What it means for claimants' counsel, funders, defendants, and other MDL courts

For claimants' counsel with large inventories. Paraquat litigation funding disclosure is now a live risk in any MDL where a firm's opt-out rate diverges sharply from the rest of the docket. Firms should assume a court that sees concentrated refusals will ask, in order: did clients understand the offer, are the claims real, and who else has a financial stake. Documented client consent to rejecting each offer, written in plain terms and kept in the file, is the best answer to the first question; contemporaneous records of exposure and diagnosis answer the second; and funding agreements that give the funder no consent or consultation rights over settlement answer the third. Retainer Agreement language disclosing funding to clients, as Model Rule 1.8(f) contemplates, is now evidence, not just compliance.

For litigation funders. Portfolio facilities secured by mass tort fees now carry disclosure risk keyed to settlement behavior. Funders should expect courts to ask whether their terms make an offer uneconomic for counsel to recommend, and should review agreements for repayment waterfalls, minimum multiples, and information or consultation rights that could be read as influence over settlement. Consumer funders with paraquat clients should expect their balances to become relevant if a court examines net recoveries.

For defendants. Syngenta and Chevron have a court that is visibly invested in the settlement's success and now actively examining the largest holdout inventory. If the disclosure stays in camera, the defense gains no direct intelligence but may benefit if the court's scrutiny moves clients into the program. If the court shares terms, the defense would learn the funding floor beneath Smith's inventory. Either way, defendants in other inventory deals, including programs with participation thresholds such as the talc and Depo-Provera settlements, now have a federal order to cite when one firm's refusals threaten a threshold.

For personal injury firms outside MDLs. The same logic travels. Courts presiding over coordinated state proceedings, such as the roughly 2,000 paraquat cases in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, have their own case-management powers, and state funding statutes increasingly make agreements discoverable. A firm that funds a large docket should assume the funding will eventually be visible to the judge who supervises the settlement.

For other MDL judges. The paraquat sequence now supplies a full playbook for courts confronting firm-concentrated opt-outs: firm-level data from administrators, random sampling with early PFS and deposition deadlines, special-master meetings with signed certifications, summons of firm principals, and finally targeted funding disclosure. Expect it to be cited, and contested, in the next large inventory settlement where participation stalls.

Frequently asked questions

What did the paraquat judge order about litigation funding?

On October 14, 2026, Chief Judge Nancy Rosenstengel ordered R. Allen Smith of The Smith Law Firm to disclose who is funding his paraquat cases. She also required him to attend fortnightly conferences where she can speak to each of his roughly 700 opt-out clients, and to produce their Plaintiff Fact Sheets and set depositions within 14 days.

Why are so many Smith Law Firm clients opting out of the paraquat settlement?

The reasons have not been explained publicly by the firm. The court is testing three possibilities: the firm values the claims above the confidential offers, some claims may not survive vetting for exposure and diagnosis, or outside financial interests may be influencing decisions. Only 49 of Smith's 750 clients were participating as of October 14.

Is litigation funding disclosure required in federal court?

There is no nationwide federal rule requiring litigation funding disclosure. The District of New Jersey (Local Civil Rule 7.1.1), the Northern District of California (Civil Local Rule 3-15), and individual judges such as Chief Judge Colm Connolly in Delaware require some disclosure, and MDL judges including Dan Polster in the opioid MDL and now Nancy Rosenstengel in paraquat have ordered it case by case.

Who are the defendants in the paraquat MDL?

The defendants in MDL No. 3004 are Syngenta Crop Protection, LLC, Syngenta AG, and Chevron U.S.A. Inc. Plaintiffs allege that exposure to the herbicide paraquat caused their Parkinson's disease; the companies deny that paraquat causes Parkinson's and have settled many claims under a confidential Master Settlement Agreement executed on September 3, 2025.

How many paraquat lawsuits are pending?

The JPML's October 1, 2026 report lists 6,602 actions pending in MDL No. 3004 in the Southern District of Illinois, and Law.com describes Judge Rosenstengel as overseeing about 6,600 paraquat suits. Roughly 2,000 more paraquat cases are coordinated in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.

The bottom line

The October 14 order turns a long-running opt-out inquiry into a question about money behind the docket. Judge Rosenstengel has not found that anyone other than Smith's clients is steering their decisions; she has said she intends to find out. With 701 of 750 clients outside the deal, a 14-day discovery clock running, and fortnightly conferences about to begin, the paraquat litigation funding disclosure will show whether the largest holdout bloc in the MDL reflects clients who want trials or economics that make settlement unaffordable for someone else. Either answer will shape how the next MDL court handles a firm whose clients will not settle.