Lawyers involved in the multidistrict litigation against pharmaceutical giant Pfizer — which is the defendant in nearly 2,000 Lipitor lawsuits in which women claim the popular statin drug designed to lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke purportedly caused type-2 diabetes — are meeting this week with the federal judge presiding over the Lipitor mass tort.

Parties submitted a joint status report to U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, in a South Carolina federal court, outlining progress made in the Lipitor litigation. Pfizer is charged with submitting millions of pages of internal company documents, shedding a light on the drug’s research and development.

A small group of Lipitor diabetes lawsuits are being prepared for trial dates next year in what are referred to as “bellwether” cases. Bellwether trials help both plaintiffs and defendants gauge how juries may respond to certain evidence and testimony common to all cases.

The outcomes of the bellwether trials can influence later negotiations between the parties, in this case Pfizer and Lipitor patients, without hundreds of individual trials taking place.

There are more than 1,350 Lipitor diabetes lawsuits involved in the Lipitor federal multidistrict litigation. Pfizer is also the named defendant in more than 300 Lipitor lawsuits in state courts across the country. Most of those diabetes lawsuits have been filed in St. Louis, Mo.

In 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered safety label changes for statins that included alerting consumers of the need for routine monitoring of liver enzymes, information about non-serious cognitive Lipitor side effects such as memory loss or confusion, reports of increased blood sugar levels, and drug interactions.

The new regulations were ordered after another study found middle-aged or older female Lipitor patients may be at an increased risk of developing type-2 diabetes. Many of the plaintiffs filing the Lipitor diabetes lawsuits were diagnosed with diabetes despite living a healthy lifestyle.

The Lipitor lawsuits filed against Pfizer accuse the drug manufacturer of failing to disclose information to both the medical field and consumers about the risks associated with the popular cholesterol-lowering statin and type-2 diabetes and of putting profits before patient safety.

Lipitor (generic name is atorvastatin) has generated some $125 billion in revenue for Pfizer since 1996.

Plaintiffs charge that Lipitor’s “inadequate and insufficient” warning label failed to disclose diabetes as a potential Lipitor side effect. Even after the FDA ordered the safety label change in 2012, the notice warning of a risk of changes to blood glucose levels were allegedly “vague, unclear and uninformative.”

Lipitor is supposed to help lower “bad” cholesterol and fats — such as LDL and triglycerides — while raising “good” cholesterol (HDL) in the blood stream. Decreased LDL and triglycerides, and increased HDL, reduces a person’s risk of heart disease and stroke.

Lipitor is the most popular of all statins, which are the most widely-prescribed class of drugs in the United States.