Wisconsin Department of Justice Urges Consumers to Claim Compensation for Inflated Generic Drug Prices

The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut granted preliminary approval in September 2026 of a distribution plan filed by Wisconsin and a coalition of 47 other states and territories to allocate settlement funds recovered from generic drug manufacturers. The settling manufacturers are Glenmark, Lannett, Bausch, Apotex, Heritage, and Heritage's parent company Emcure, with combined settlements totaling more than $96.5 million. The distribution plan targets consumers who purchased covered generic drugs between May 2009 and December 2019. The underlying antitrust litigation encompasses three separate complaints filed beginning in 2016. The first complaint named Heritage and 17 other corporate defendants, two individual defendants, and 15 generic drugs. The second complaint, filed in 2019, named Teva Pharmaceuticals and 21 other large generic drug manufacturers, along with 16 individual senior executive defendants. The third complaint, which is set to be tried first, covers 80 topical generic drugs accounting for billions of dollars in U.S. sales and names 26 corporate defendants and 10 individual defendants. The states allege that competing generic drug executives coordinated illegal price-fixing agreements through industry dinners, lunches, cocktail parties, golf outings, telephone calls, emails, and text messages. The complaints allege that defendants used internal terms such as "fair share," "playing nice in the sandbox," and "responsible competitor" to describe conduct that allegedly suppressed competition and artificially raised prices. Investigators assembled a document database of more than 20 million records and a phone records database covering millions of call detail records and contact information for over 600 sales and pricing individuals in the generics industry. Two former Heritage Pharmaceuticals executives, Jeffery Glazer and Jason Malek, have entered settlement agreements and are cooperating with the states. Seven additional pharmaceutical executives in the topical-drugs complaint are also cooperating. Evidence includes a two-volume notebook in which a cooperating witness memorialized contemporaneous notes of competitor phone calls and internal company meetings over several years.