On August 27, 2026, Judge Karen S. Marston entered Case Management Order No. 14 in the federal GLP-1 vision loss litigation. Scheduling orders are usually the least interesting documents on a docket. This one is worth reading, because it puts dates on the two questions the court decided in July would be answered before anything else: whether these medications are capable of causing NAION at all, and whether federal drug labeling law bars the plaintiffs’ failure-to-warn claims. Fact discovery against the Eli Lilly defendants closes December 18, 2026; against the Novo Nordisk defendants, February 26, 2027. Expert reports run through the spring, expert depositions finish June 4, 2027, and motions to exclude expert opinions under Rule 702 — filed alongside summary judgment motions — are due July 2, 2027, fully briefed by August 31 of that year. What the order does not contain is a trial date, a bellwether pool, or any hint of how those two questions come out.
The dates
Case Management Order No. 14 governs early discovery and motion practice on what the court calls the cross-cutting issues — general causation and preemption/warning adequacy — together with master pleadings and the proposed plaintiff fact sheets. In order:
- September 25, 2026 — joint or competing plaintiff fact sheets and fact sheet enabling orders are submitted to the court.
- October 28, 2026 — plaintiffs submit their master complaint.
- December 18, 2026 — fact discovery closes as to the Lilly defendants.
- February 26, 2027 — fact discovery closes as to the Novo Nordisk defendants.
- March 26, 2027 — plaintiffs serve expert reports. Defendants serve theirs by April 23; plaintiffs’ rebuttal reports follow on April 30.
- June 4, 2027 — expert depositions are complete.
- July 2, 2027 — Rule 702 motions to exclude expert opinions, and summary judgment motions, are filed with initial briefs. Oppositions August 13, replies August 31.
Two staggered fact discovery deadlines, ten weeks apart, is the detail to notice. The Lilly defendants are on the shorter clock because they are in a smaller share of the cases.
Why these two questions, and why first
The schedule implements a decision the court made two months earlier. In Case Management Order No. 12, entered July 2, 2026, Judge Marston granted the defendants’ request to take up general causation and preemption ahead of everything else, and rejected the plaintiffs’ alternative — a “pilot cases” framework under which a selected group of cases would be worked up on specific issues. The court noted that the plaintiffs’ own counsel, at the June 23 hearing, said they wanted bellwether selection at this stage.
The order sets out the range of outcomes it is aiming at, and it is unusually direct about them.
…it streamlines how the case will move forward, allowing structured discovery and motion practice on issues that could resolve all the cases in this MDL, result in the Lilly Defendants’ termination from the case, or on the other hand, determine that these issues are to be decided by a jury and move forward with bellwether selection with the benefit of that ruling.
Those are three different futures, and the schedule in CMO 14 is the machinery for choosing between them. The July 2027 motions are where the choice gets made — or, more precisely, where it gets briefed.
A proceeding smaller than its reputation
This litigation is often described in the same breath as the much larger GLP-1 proceeding over gastrointestinal injuries, which is before the same judge. The two are not the same size. CMO 12 records 137 cases in the vision loss MDL as of June 15, 2026, only 19 of them brought against the Lilly defendants; the gastrointestinal MDL, by comparison, involves more than 3,000 plaintiffs and roughly a dozen distinct alleged injuries. The court also recorded that the defendants had already produced part of the regulatory discovery and had agreed to begin producing marketing discovery in early 2027.
The discovery master
Three weeks after CMO 12, the court entered Case Management Order No. 13, appointing the Honorable Lawrence F. Stengel, a retired judge of the same court, as Special Discovery Master under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 53(a)(1)(C). He hears discovery disputes between the parties, and between a party and a third party, in the first instance. His rate is $1,200 an hour, associates assisting him are capped at $400, fee applications go to the court quarterly, and plaintiffs and defendants each pay half unless he recommends otherwise for a particular dispute.
Appointing a discovery master is not a signal about the merits. It is a signal about volume: the court expects enough discovery friction across two defendant groups and a compressed schedule that routing it through a dedicated judicial officer is cheaper than routing it through the district judge.
What has not happened
There is no settlement program on this docket. There is no mediator, no settlement conference, no claims administrator, no bellwether trial and no verdict. There is a schedule, a discovery master, and a set of unanswered scientific and legal questions with dates attached to them.
If you lost vision after taking one of these medications
Our case page on the GLP-1 vision loss lawsuit explains what NAION is, what the published research does and does not establish, and what we ask for on a first call. The schedule above is the litigation’s clock, not yours: the deadline that governs an individual claim is the statute of limitations in the state where it would be filed, and that one runs regardless of what the MDL is doing. If you are unsure when yours started, that is a question worth asking early rather than late.
This article is general information about how these cases work. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and no two claims are alike. If something here sounds like your situation, the useful next step is a conversation about the facts.
