After three huge damage awards by Bay Area juries to cancer victims exposed to Monsanto Co. herbicides, a judge has partially granted the company’s request to move the next group of federal trials out of California.

U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco is overseeing about 1,300 suits filed against the agrochemical giant in federal courts across the country, with an additional 12,000 pending in state courts. He presided over the first federal trial, in which a jury awarded more than $80 million in March to a Sonoma County man who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after spraying Monsanto’s Roundup on his property for more than 26 years.

Chhabria is scheduled to hold another San Francisco trial in February and plans to refer several cases of elderly or seriously ill plaintiffs to federal judges elsewhere in California. But with early trials likely to set standards for a potential nationwide settlement, Monsanto asked Chhabria last month to schedule the next round of cases in other states, citing California’s plaintiff-friendly laws and what the company called “highly prejudicial coverage” by news media.

The judge’s order Friday allowed each side to choose a state where the first two rounds of cases would be tried. The plaintiffs chose California, where 17 suits are pending, and Monsanto picked Nebraska, with five cases. Pretrial proceedings in those cases are scheduled through December. For the second round, with pretrial proceedings through next June, the plaintiffs chose Illinois, with 30 federal cases, and Monsanto opted for North Carolina, with seven cases.

Bayer AG, the German pharmaceutical company that owns Monsanto, said Chhabria’s decision “will increase the diversity of data points in this national litigation, which will benefit all parties.”

Roundup is the world’s most widely used herbicide. The International Association for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, in 2015 classified the product’s active ingredient, glyphosate, as a probable cause of human cancer. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and regulatory bodies in most other countries say the herbicide can be used safely.

Relying on the international agency’s assessment, and arguing that Monsanto had unduly influenced the EPA, lawyers for cancer victims have won three jury verdicts finding that the herbicide was a probable cause of their illness. In addition to the $80 million federal verdict, a San Francisco jury awarded $289 million to a Benicia school groundskeeper, damages that a judge later reduced to $78.5 million. Last month an Alameda County jury awarded more than $2 billion, mostly in punitive damages, to a Livermore couple who had sprayed Roundup for more than 30 years.

Monsanto has appealed the earlier verdicts, and on Tuesday asked Superior Court Judge Winifred Smith to overturn the verdict for the Livermore couple, Alva and Alberta Pilliod.

The verdict reflects “deep passion and prejudice,” the company’s lawyers argued. They said the Pilliods’ lawyer was allowed to use “inflammatory language,” including assertions that the EPA and a European regulatory agency that had approved the herbicide would have “blood on their hands.” And the lawyers also said Smith should have allowed evidence of the EPA’s recent decision to reaffirm its approval of glyphosate.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko