Abbott’s $670 Million Formula Deal Leaves 12,700 Infant Claims

Abbott Laboratories will pay about $670 million to settle the Gill infant-formula case and claims for about 2,000 other premature babies. The company said on August 20 that the deals are a compromise, not an admission that Similac Special Care 24 caused necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC.

The check is smaller than the headline once Gill is taken out. A St. Louis jury awarded $495 million in that one case in July 2024, and Abbott put Gill plus interest at about $600 million. The leftover fight is larger still: roughly 1,700 lawsuits covering about 12,700 infants, and a legal rule that may send the warning duty to NICU doctors rather than to parents.

A $670 Million Bundle Built Around Gill

Abbott Park, Illinois, announced agreements with three law firms to resolve Gill and NEC claims for about 2,000 additional infants, for a total of about $670 million. Law.com named those firms as TorHoerman in Chicago, Holland Law Firm in St. Louis, and Stranch, Jennings & Garvey in Nashville. Reuters reported that Abbott had been asking the Missouri Supreme Court to take the case after the Missouri Court of Appeals let the $495 million judgment stand in May 2026.

The company’s own arithmetic is the tell. It said it chose the package rather than “continuing to appeal or paying approximately $600 million,” the Gill judgment plus interest. The published totals leave about $70 million of room above that Gill-with-interest figure to cover the other 2,000 infants. Abbott did not break out what each family will receive, and it said the deals “are not in any way an admission of liability.”

Margo Gill’s child, Robynn Gill, was fed Similac Special Care 24, a hospital formula for premature babies, not the powder sold in grocery aisles. The family said the child “suffered severe, irreversible brain damage.” Lawyers argued Abbott had “known for years that its cow’s milk-based formula significantly increases the risk” of NEC and put no warning on the label.

THE $670 MILLION BUNDLE

• Gill verdict: A St. Louis jury awarded $495 million in July 2024, and Abbott later put the judgment plus interest at about $600 million.
• The add-on docket: The same package also resolves NEC claims for about 2,000 other infants represented by three law firms.
• The company’s line: Abbott “stands by the safety of these products and the essential role they play in helping the medical community care for preterm infants.”
• The cash context: Second-quarter Nutrition sales of $2.14 billion mean the settlement is about a third of one quarter’s nutrition revenue.

U.S. Nutrition sales were $871 million in the quarter, and U.S. pediatric nutrition was $525 million, after a 10.7 percent drop from a year earlier. Abbott still posted $12.59 billion in company-wide quarterly sales and raised its 2026 adjusted earnings outlook. This is a nutrition-legal cost a diversified device-and-diagnostics group can write, not a going-concern event.

What Still Hangs After the Three-Firm Deal?

After these agreements, Abbott said there are roughly 1,700 lawsuits pending in federal and state court on behalf of about 12,700 individual infants. That headcount is the figure that should worry holders more than the check just written, because it is six times the infant count in the settled tranche and because Abbott itself says the 12,700 figure is swollen.

The company is working “to identify and eliminate” claims it calls defective. It listed four groups inside that remaining population, and those groups will decide how much of the leftover docket is real exposure.

HOW ABBOTT DESCRIBES THE REMAINING DOCKET

• Two makers, no product: Some filings name both Abbott and Mead Johnson without saying which formula the infant actually received.
• NEC before formula: Some infants were diagnosed with the bowel disease before any formula was given.
• No NEC diagnosis: Some claimants, Abbott said, were never diagnosed with NEC at all.
• Repeat filings: Some names appear in more than one lawsuit in more than one court.

More than 825 of the federal cases sit in Multidistrict Litigation 3026 in the Northern District of Illinois, before Judge Rebecca R. Pallmeyer. Other cases remain in state courts in Illinois, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Reckitt’s Mead Johnson unit, which sells Enfamil Premature 24, is the other defendant across much of this docket. A global settlement program does not exist.

Public talk after the announcement often fused this NEC docket with Abbott’s 2022 Sturgis, Michigan, plant shutdown over Cronobacter and the later Justice Department civil path. Those are separate stories. The $670 million is about hospital preterm formula and bowel injury claims, not the sanitation case that emptied store shelves.

Illinois Says the Duty to Warn Runs to Doctors

The leftover cases will turn on a dry rule with a hard edge: who had to be warned. Plaintiffs say parents never saw a label that named NEC. Makers say the customer in a neonatal intensive care unit is the neonatologist, who already knows the disease and orders the feed.

That is the learned intermediary doctrine. On June 12, 2026, the Illinois Appellate Court, Fifth District, applied it to hospital preterm formula in Watson v. Mead Johnson, reversing a $60 million verdict for Jasmine Watson, whose son Chance Dean died at 25 days after Enfamil Premature 24 in a St. Clair County NICU. Chance was born more than two months early, one of twins. Memorial Hospital, the court record shows, had no donor milk, so doctors moved him to the cow’s-milk hospital formula.

The appeals court held that the formula was obtained by the hospital, that no infant in that NICU could receive it without a physician’s order, and that neonatologists chose it after weighing gestational age, birth weight, and the NEC risk of formula versus human milk. The duty, it said, ran to the physicians, not to the mother, who never bought the can. The trial judge’s refusal to instruct the jury on that rule “fundamentally skewed the legal lens,” the panel wrote, and a new trial was ordered. Watson’s lawyers called the reading an expansion of the law and said they were weighing a petition to the Illinois Supreme Court.

Abbott pointed to Watson in its August 20 statement and called the doctrine “a defense relevant in a substantial number of cases.” In March 2026 a Florida state court, in Ennix v. Abbott, dismissed preterm-formula claims on the same theory. If that holding spreads, families who never saw a can in a gift shop lose the failure-to-warn theory that won Gill, because the warning was owed to the people who already run the unit.

The Milk-Versus-Formula Fight in the Science

NEC inflames and kills intestinal tissue in premature infants. The HHS working group that NICHD convened in 2024 told the secretary that one infant dies almost every day from NEC in the United States, and that CDC counted 356 NEC deaths in 2022. Reuters puts mortality above 20 percent. The sickest cases are in very low birth weight babies, under 1,500 grams, or 3.3 pounds. Survivors who need surgery carry a higher risk of lasting brain-development problems.

NEC IN THE UNITED STATES

• Daily toll: The NICHD working group reported that one infant dies almost every day from NEC.
• 2022 deaths: CDC counted 356 NEC deaths that year, a figure the working group said is likely low because definitions and codes still vary.
• Who is at risk: Preterm birth and very low birth weight sit at the top of the risk list; about 1 in 10 U.S. births is premature, per CDC figures Abbott cited.
• What milk does: Human milk is tied to lower NEC rates, and a Cochrane review found donor milk cuts NEC risk by half compared with formula in 11 trials of 2,261 infants.

Plaintiffs treat that gap as proof that cow’s-milk protein in hospital formula is a toxin. Federal scientists have refused that leap. A 100-page NICHD working-group report of 24 doctors and eight government officials said absence of human milk raises NEC risk, rather than exposure to formula. In October 2024 the FDA, CDC, and NIH said there is “no conclusive evidence that preterm infant formula causes NEC” and “strong evidence that human milk is protective against NEC.” They also said those formulas “are part of the standard of care” when a parent’s milk and donor milk fall short.

Mark Corkins, division chief of pediatric gastroenterology at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, put the clinician view bluntly in remarks Abbott repeated: “There is no evidence that the formulas cause NEC. That is why these court cases make no sense to the folks who understand the actual science.” The NEC Society, a group that wants the disease gone, has said feeding choices “should be made in the NICU, not in courtrooms.” Abbott notes it is one of only two U.S. companies making these hospital products, and that FDA has not ordered a label change.

The science still leaves a hole a jury can walk through. Human milk lowers NEC. Formula is what many units use when milk is short. Mothers of the most premature babies often cannot pump enough, and donor milk is not on every shelf. That gap, not a finding that the can itself is poison, is what the federal papers actually describe.

825 Federal Cases and a Split Scoreboard

State juries and federal judges have not been reading from the same page. Gill was a plaintiff blowout in St. Louis. Watson was a plaintiff blowout that an appeals court took apart. In April 2026 a Cook County jury ordered Abbott to pay $70 million to four families, Reuters reported, $53 million in compensatory damages and $17 million in punitive damages, a result Abbott said it would appeal and that is not a final judgment.

Federal court has been colder. Abbott said it won all three federal MDL bellwether cases before they reached a jury, and that in July 2026 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed a pretrial judgment for Abbott in the first of those. In October 2024 a jury cleared both Abbott and Mead Johnson in a case brought for a boy named Kaine, after the plaintiff’s lawyers had sought more than $6.2 billion; Reckitt shares jumped on that verdict.

Pallmeyer has described cow’s-milk hospital formula as a “lifeboat” product, Abbott’s statement notes, meaning units will keep using it until human-milk formula can cover every shortfall. That line will sit in front of every remaining jury, beside the Gill number and the Watson reversal.

In a Chicago Courtroom, Mead Johnson Goes First

While Abbott was writing its $670 million checks, the first federal NEC case to reach a jury was already open in Chicago. Alexis Inman alleges that her son Daniel, born at 29 weeks on May 12, 2020, died after Enfamil Premature formula. Judge Pallmeyer denied Mead Johnson summary judgment on May 8, 2026, and later refused a last-minute bid to kill the design-defect claim under a new Supreme Court preemption ruling in a Roundup case. Opening statements went to the jury in the week of August 18. No verdict had been reported by August 26.

Inman’s lawyers, according to accounts of those openings, asked why doctors never got a clear warning if the company had long seen a higher NEC rate in cow’s-milk feeds. The defense said extreme prematurity and other medical risks, not the formula, caused the disease. Because this is the first federal data point after three Abbott dismissals, a plaintiff win would reprice the 825 MDL files. A defense win would confirm that federal court is a bad room for these claims and push more of the fight into state court, where Gill happened.

Abbott is not in the Inman box. It still lives with whatever number that Chicago jury writes, because the same science and the same warning theory run through both makers’ remaining cases. The three-firm deal does not bind anyone whose lawyers were not at that table.

Medical Groups Warn That the Formula Supply Could Shrink

On August 7, 2026, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the March of Dimes, and several neonatal groups told the U.S. Supreme Court that large verdicts plus thousands of pending claims pose a grave threat to preterm formula supply. They called preterm formula “an indispensable component of neonatal medicine.” Abbott repeated that brief in its settlement release, because a second maker walking away would leave U.S. NICUs with one supplier, or none, for a product the academy still recommends when mother’s milk and donor milk run out.

The substantial verdicts already entered in other cases, together with the thousands of similar claims now pending, pose a grave threat to the preterm formula supply. Should that supply diminish or be withdrawn, neonatologists and pediatric clinicians would lose an essential instrument of care and with foreseeable consequences: increased infant mortality, impaired neurological development, and permanent degradation of the standard of care for the Nation’s most vulnerable patients.

American Academy of Pediatrics and allied medical groups, brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, August 7, 2026

Abbott’s $670 million package takes Gill and one inventory of 2,000 claims off the board without a label change and without a finding that the formula causes NEC. The Watson rule, the Inman jury, and the rest of those 12,700 names are what still set the cost of keeping the cans in the unit.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a company legal settlement, court rulings, and published scientific statements. It is informational only and is not medical advice, legal advice, or investment advice, and it is not a guide to feeding a premature infant or to filing or valuing a claim. Readers should consult a neonatologist or pediatrician on feeding decisions, a licensed attorney on any lawsuit, and a qualified financial adviser before acting on Abbott or Reckitt securities. Figures, case counts, and trial status reflect the cited sources as of August 26, 2026, and may change as courts rule and as the company reports further reserves or deals.