A Washington state appeals court panel has reversed personal sanctions of $2,500 each imposed on four attorneys who represented Pharmacia LLC, a successor to Monsanto Co., in a polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) exposure case, ruling that the trial court had no authority to impose that kind of punishment. In an unpublished opinion reported by Mealey's on Friday, November 13, the panel held that Washington Superior Court Civil Rule 37(b)(2) “does not authorize personal punitive sanctions for violation of a discovery order,” reversed the sanctions and sent the case back to the trial court with instructions to vacate them.

Source: Mealey's

The sanctions grew out of a discovery dispute — the late disclosure of expert witnesses — inside the long-running PCB litigation, according to Mealey's report of the opinion. The panel's ruling is about the limits of a trial judge's sanction power over individual lawyers personally; it does not decide the underlying PCB claims, which continue separately.

The underlying case is Rose v. Pharmacia LLC in King County Superior Court, one of the Washington lawsuits brought by former students, teachers and parents connected to the Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe. Those plaintiffs allege they were exposed to PCBs from older fluorescent light fixtures at the school and suffered health effects. Pharmacia, as a Monsanto successor, has defended the cases; Monsanto manufactured PCBs decades ago and the chemical family has been the subject of school-exposure trials in Washington for years.

A sanctions fight inside a much larger case

The personal penalties had a contested history before this week's ruling. Law360 reported in March 2025 that the trial judge partially reconsidered an earlier decision to personally sanction eight attorneys representing Monsanto over late disclosure of expert reports ahead of a Seattle PCB trial, downgrading some of the penalties while still concluding that the defence team had deliberately violated a court scheduling order. The attorneys then took the surviving personal sanctions to the Court of Appeals, Division I, in the appeal docketed as No. 880543, arising from King County cause No. 18-2-58239-3 SEA.

Source: Law360

In their appellate filing, the attorneys argued the trial court first imposed the costs on Pharmacia and then, months later, shifted them onto a subset of the lawyers without notice or a chance to be heard, and that the sanctions were disproportionate and rested on unsupported factual findings. They also argued that the analysis Washington law requires before such sanctions — the so-called Burnet analysis — was missing, and that their due-process rights were violated. Those were the attorneys' arguments in their brief, as filed with the appeals court; the panel's reported holding rests on the narrower legal ground that the rule itself does not authorise personal punitive sanctions of this kind.

Source: Washington Courts (appellate filing, No. 880543)

That distinction matters for lawyers across Washington. Discovery sanctions are a routine tool for policing deadlines, and trial courts can order a party — and in some situations its counsel — to pay costs caused by a violation. What the panel rejected, according to Mealey's account of the opinion, is using Rule 37(b)(2) as a source of personal, punitive fines against individual attorneys for breaking a discovery order. The opinion is unpublished, which in Washington means it carries no binding precedential value for other cases, though it fully decides this dispute between these parties.

The PCB school cases remain some of the most expensive toxic-tort litigation in Washington. Juries in related Sky Valley cases have returned large verdicts, and appeals courts have also undone major results — in related litigation, a Washington appeals court previously overturned a $185 million verdict over the same school-exposure allegations, in a ruling centred on liability timelines and damages law. Friday's decision adds a different kind of appellate correction: not about PCBs themselves, but about how far a trial court can go in punishing the lawyers in front of it.

Mealey's report of the opinion did not include a response from Pharmacia, Monsanto's owner Bayer, or the plaintiffs' lawyers, and no reaction from them is reported here. The ruling's practical effect is immediate for the four attorneys — the $2,500 personal sanctions are reversed — while the order to vacate is carried out back in the trial court.