It’s not unusual for attorneys to seek stays when a higher court is considering a key issue related to their case, but a small wave of these motions seen in consolidated actions across the country—all citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to take up a key jurisdictional issue—has struck some attorneys as unusual, and a sign of the potential significance the case holds.
The case at issue is Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California, which lays the groundwork for the justices to review whether out-of-state plaintiffs can sue out-of-state defendants when the defendant’s conduct in the chosen state venue is not causally related to the plaintiff’s claimed injuries. A ruling on the issue, according to numerous attorneys, could cause a severe decline in consolidated actions across the country, since many of these matters involve large numbers of out-of-state plaintiffs.
