Multidistrict litigation

In the United States, multidistrict litigation (MDL) refers to a special federal legal procedure designed to speed the process of handling complex cases, such as air disaster litigation or complex product liability suits.

MDL cases occur when "civil actions involving one or more common questions of fact are pending in different districts." In order to efficiently process cases that could involve hundreds (or thousands) of plaintiffs in dozens of different federal courts that all share common issues, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) decides whether cases should be consolidated under MDL, if so, where the cases should be transferred. Cases subject to MDL are sent from one court, known as the transferor, to another, known as the transferee, for all pretrial proceedings and discovery. If a case is not settled or dismissed in the transferee court, it is remanded (that is, sent back) to the transferor court for trial.

The MDL statute is 28 U.S.C. § 1407 in the United States Code. Section 1407 came about because of the first large-scale complex litigation to engulf the federal judiciary: the gigantic antitrust scandal in the U.S. electrical equipment industry in the early 1960s. The scandal resulted in the filing of 1,912 separate civil actions in district courts in 36 federal judicial districts, which together pleaded a total of 25,714 claims involving 20 product lines. In January 1962, Chief Justice Earl Warren appointed a Co-ordinating Committee for Multiple Litigation of the United States District Courts. (The Committee's name reflects the fact that it was still commonplace at the time to include a hyphen in the word "coordinate.") The chair of the Committee was Alfred P. Murrah, then the chief judge of the Tenth Circuit. The Committee responded to the emergency with a number of ad hoc procedures which would become commonplace in multidistrict litigation, such as consolidated national depositions and document depositories. Through aggressive case management, the Committee was able to terminate the electrical equipment litigation by March 1967; only nine cases went to trial and only five of those went to verdict. In the course of its work, the Committee discovered that complex litigation involving similar issues in multiple districts was becoming a regularly recurring problem in federal courts, and recommended the enactment of a formal statutory foundation for their management in March 1964. This eventually led to the enactment of the MDL statute four years later and the creation of the JPML as a permanent replacement for the Committee.

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