The last ordering paragraph of Case Management Order No. 12 is one sentence long and easy to skim past. It directs the parties to meet and confer about a schedule for exchanging plaintiffs’ fact sheets and “medical records that confirm proof of use and proof of diagnosis.” Two months later the court gave that sentence a deadline: September 25, 2026, for the parties to submit a joint or competing plaintiff fact sheet and the enabling orders that go with it. Once that form is settled, it becomes the document every claimant in the federal GLP-1 vision loss litigation fills out. Proof of use means records showing which medication was taken and when. Proof of diagnosis means records showing that the vision loss was NAION, and when it was found. Claims that can document both are in a different position from claims that cannot.
What a plaintiff fact sheet is
In a multidistrict proceeding, individual depositions of thousands of plaintiffs are impractical early on. Instead the court adopts a standard questionnaire, served on every plaintiff, answered under oath, with specified records attached. It functions as interrogatories and a document request rolled into one form, and it is how defendants learn the shape of the inventory they are facing.
The fact sheet is also how a proceeding sorts itself. Cases where the records line up move forward. Cases where a claimed medication cannot be tied to a prescription, or where the eye injury turns out to be something other than NAION, tend to come out — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes on motion.
…a proposed schedule for the exchange of Plaintiffs’ fact sheets and medical records that confirm proof of use and proof of diagnosis.
Proof of use
This is usually the easier half, and it is usually not in the plaintiff’s own filing cabinet. Pharmacy dispensing records are the backbone: they show the drug, the strength, the fill dates and the prescriber. Pharmacies keep them for years and will produce a printout on request. Health insurance explanation of benefit statements do similar work from the other direction, and so do the prescribing notes in a primary care, endocrinology or weight management chart.
Three situations complicate it. Samples handed out in a clinic may never appear in a pharmacy record. Medication obtained through a compounding pharmacy or a telehealth service may sit in a different system entirely. And people who took more than one of these medications over several years frequently cannot recall which was which — which is a records problem, not a credibility problem, and is exactly what dispensing histories are for.
Proof of diagnosis
NAION is diagnosed clinically, by examination, usually by an ophthalmologist or a neuro-ophthalmologist. The records that carry a diagnosis are the ones generated around the event: the emergency or urgent care note from the day vision changed, the dilated exam findings, visual field testing, optical coherence tomography, photographs of the optic disc, and the follow-up notes tracking whether anything recovered.
Timing inside those records matters as much as the diagnosis itself. The date vision loss was first noticed, the date of the first examination, and the interval between them are what allow a sequence to be established relative to when the medication was being taken. That is why a note recording that someone woke up with vision loss on a particular morning can be more useful than a specialist letter written a year later.
Why the standard is set where it is
This is an association case, not a signature-injury case. NAION occurs in people who have never taken any of these medications; it is associated with a crowded optic disc anatomy, and with diabetes, hypertension and sleep apnea — conditions common among the people prescribed these drugs. The European Medicines Agency’s safety committee concluded in June 2025 that NAION is a very rare side effect of semaglutide medicines, affecting up to 1 in 10,000 people treated, and recommended adding it to the European product information. Published observational studies have reported associations of differing size, and they say themselves that they can infer association rather than establish causation.
In that environment, documentation is what separates a claim a court can evaluate from an account it cannot. None of this is decided: the court has set general causation for briefing in 2027, and no ruling has issued on whether these medications can cause NAION.
If your records are incomplete
Most people’s are. Nobody assembles a medical file in advance of an injury, and the fact sheet deadline in this litigation runs against the parties, not against someone deciding whether to speak to a lawyer. Records can be requested from pharmacies, insurers, hospitals and practices, and that retrieval is ordinary work rather than something a claimant has to complete alone. Our case page explains what we ask for on a first call and which records tend to matter most. Start with what you have, and be accurate about what you do not.
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.
