It’s the end of an era in the pharmacy world – as of this week, Rite-Aid has closed all of its stores, leaving its competitors CVS and Walgreens as the remaining standalone pharmacy chains. The closures were the result of multiple bankruptcies and years of financial problems, including litigation expenses resulting from the opioid crisis.
Docket Alarm analytics can reveal the trends and types of litigation facing these three pharmacy chains, and who is sued alongside them.
Docket Alarm is tracking 9,113 lawsuits in federal court against Walgreens, CVS, and Rite-Aid that have been filed since 2020. The pace of litigation has remained steady, with about 100-200 cases filed per month. However, in February 2023. 1,720 cases were filed. 1,500 of these were filed in one district court in Florida, and are related to In re: Zantac Products Liability Litigation. This is a long-running, multidistrict case against not only pharmacies but also drug manufacturers.
As would be expected from a pharmacy, pharmaceutical personal injury is by far the highest case type. (Cases related to the opioid crisis tend to be classified here.) However, due to their stature as large employers, the pharmacies face large amounts of employment litigation. There’s also a large amount of personal injury litigation, which could result from pharmaceutical issues or simply be a result of the chains’ massive logistical and physical footprint.
The list of parties sued in this analysis is revealing. CVS and Walgreens faced over 3,000 cases, but so did drug manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline. Other drugmakers are on the list too, indicating that, more often than not in federal court, these pharmaceutical chains are sued alongside drugmakers themselves. This is often the case in multidistrict cases relating to pharmaceuticals, as plaintiffs pursue both the makers of allegedly defective drugs alongside the distributors.
Even though Rite-Aid just ceased operations this week, it still faced much less litigation than CVS and Walgreens in the last five years. Only 1,211 cases were filed against them in the last five years.
