Many of the law suits prominent in today’s headlines—the ones concerning opioids, talc, NFL concussions and many pharmaceutical products—are part of a 50-year-old experiment in legal procedure known as multidistrict litigation whose vital signs are now flashing an immediate need for intensive care.
Multidistrict litigation was created by Congress in 1968 to facilitate “consolidation for pretrial purposes” when multiple cases concerning the same issues were filed in different courts around the country. It was, and still remains, a worthy goal to provide efficiency and uniformity in the management of discovery and other pretrial matters in such cases before sending them back for trial in the courts where they were filed.
