Mass Tort Litigation Blog

Sampling in CAFA litigation

In a recent decision authored by Judge Easterbrook, the 7th Circuit suggested that plaintiffs looking to prove that their case falls under the "home state exception" to CAFA can use sampling and extrapolation to prove their allegations.  The case is Myrick v. WellPoint, Inc., 2014 BL 229924, 7th Cir., No. 12-3882 , 8/19/14 (citation is to Bloomberg, the Westlaw cite is 2014 WL 4073065).   The case concerns allegations about a health insurance policy sold in Illinois.  

Judge Easterbrook, explaining that the burden of proving the home state exception is on the party assserting it in the 7th Circuit, explained a potential procedure as follows:

Counsel for the proposed class assumed that there were only two options: determine the citizenship of every policyholder (expensive) or rely on assumptions (cheap). But there's at least one more option: take a random sample of policyholders (100, say), ascertain the citizenship of each of these on the date the case was removed, and extrapolate to the class as a whole. If the sample yields a lopsided result (say, 90% Illinois citizens or only 50% Illinois citizens) then the outcome is clear without the need for more evidence. (The more lopsided the result, the smaller the sample needed to achieve statistical significance.) If the result is close to the statutory two-thirds line, then do more sampling and hire a statistician to ensure that the larger sample produces a reliable result.

 

 

 

Silver and Hyman on Medical Malpractice Litigation

Professors Charlie Silver and David Hyman have posted their latest article, "Double, Double Toil and Trouble: Justice-Talk and the Future of Medical Malpractice Litigation," on SSRN.  Their article studies the people behind the cases: the lawyers.  It examines the market for legal services and how recent economic changes have impacted that market.  Here's the abstract: 

It’s not easy being a lawyer. “Biglaw” may not be dead (yet), but major firms have dissolved, filed for bankruptcy, and shed partners and practice groups. Small and mid-sized firms and solo practitioners are facing similar challenges. Some of these developments are attributable to the financial crisis and the Great Recession. Others are the result of structural and technological changes affecting the market for legal services — and those changes have revealed new weaknesses in the business forms through which lawyers have traditionally delivered legal services. To most inhabitants of Biglaw, these changes and challenges are unprecedented, but to lawyers who do medical malpractice and personal injury litigation, market turbulence of this sort is old hat. Over the past three decades, there have been dramatic changes in the market (and demand) for such services. Some of these changes are clearly attributable to legislative action, including caps on noneconomic or total damages, and procedural hurdles such as screening panels, certification requirements, and interlocutory appeals of expert witness reports. But, even in states that have not taken such steps, there has been a long-term secular decline in the volume of medical malpractice litigation. Apart from the highly visible public brawl over the merits of damage caps, these developments have attracted little attention. However, the dynamics are clear to those who wish to pay attention to them. In this Article, we explore these trends, highlight the ways in which they have interacted with one another, and then briefly discuss why it is not helpful to analyze these developments in terms of their impact on “access to justice.”

Mullenix on Compensation Funds

Professor Linda Mullenix has posted a new article titled "Designing Compensatory Funds: In Search of First Principles" on SSRN.  It takes on several high-profile compensation funds and may have something of interest to say about how GM is designing its own compensation fund.  Here's the abstract:

The World Trade Center Victims’ Compensation Fund of 2001 ushered in a new age of fund approaches to resolving claims for mass disasters in the United States. Since then, numerous funds have been created following several mass events injuring large numbers of claimants. The Gulf Coast Claims Facility, created in the immediate aftermath of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil platform explosion, represented a further expansion of fund design and operation. The funds that have been implemented since 2001, including the World Trade Center Fund, have been the object of both praise as well as criticism. Notably, all these funds have been designed and implemented after the events giving rise to a universe of mass claimants. This article suggests that the policy recommendations for future fund design largely fail to address antecedent threshold questions about the nature of the events giving rise to possible recourse to a fund for compensation of claims. Although such compensation funds have been intended to provide an alternative to the tort compensation system and to operate largely outside the purview of the judicial system, instead most fund designs have relied on tort notions of corrective justice that mimic the tort system. However, many funds have in practice entailed mixed theories of corrective and distributive justice, confusing the purpose, utility, and goals of such funds. This article asks fundamental questions about the goals of such funds and whether and to what extent disaster compensation funds comport with theories of justice. It suggests that certain types of mass disaster events ought not to be resolved through fund auspices at all, while only a limited universe of communitarian harms should give rise to such a response. Finally, a communitarian fund designed ex-ante might more fairly be based on theories of distributive justice based on an egalitarian social welfare norm.