Mass Tort Litigation Blog

Mass Torts with a Consumer Class Action Garnish

Somehow I missed Alison Frankel's report on a consumer class action in Texas spurred by solicitations to join a mass tort.  Here is the report:

http://blogs.reuters.com/alison-frankel/2016/08/30/client-solicitation-101-dont-robocall-the-guy-running-the-mass-tort/

It's like she wrote my complex litigation exam for me.  ADL 

Bradt and Rave on The Information-Forcing Role of the Judge in Multidistrict Litigation

Professors Andrew Bradt (UC Berkeley Law) and D. Theodore Rave (U. Houston Law) have posted to SSRN their article, The Information-Forcing Role of the Judge in Multidistrict Litigation, Cal. L. Rev. (forthcoming).  Here is the abstract:

In this article, we address one of the most controversial and current questions in federal civil procedure: What is the proper role of the judge in the settlement of mass-tort multidistrict litigation, or MDL? Due to the Supreme Court’s hostility to class actions, MDL proceedings have begun to dominate the federal civil docket. To wit, nearly half of the federal civil caseload is MDL. Although MDL is structurally different from a class action, the procedure replicates — and in many ways complicates — the principal-agent problems that plagued the class action. Like a class action, nearly all MDL cases are resolved by a comprehensive global settlement agreement, but, unlike a class action, in MDL the judge has no authority to reject a settlement agreement as unfair to the potentially thousands of parties ensnared in the litigation. Here, we argue that, given this limitation, the judge should act as an “information-forcing intermediary,” who reserves the right to offer a non-binding opinion about the fairness of the settlement to send an easy-to-understand signal directly to the parties about their lawyers’ performance. Such a signal will mitigate many of the agency problems inherent to MDL and allow parties to exercise informed consent when choosing whether to accept a settlement. More generally, this article is a call for judges to embrace an information-forcing role at the head of consolidated MDL proceedings.

Inside the Agency Class Action

Adam Zimmerman of Loyola and Michael Sant'Ambrogio of Michigan State have just posted on SSRN a draft of their new article, Inside the Agency Class Action, forthcoming in the Yale Law Journal. Here is the abstract:

Federal agencies in the United States hear almost twice as many cases each year as all the federal courts. But agencies routinely avoid using tools that courts rely on to efficiently resolve large groups of claims: class actions and other complex litigation procedures. As a result, across the administrative state, the number of claims languishing on agency dockets has produced crippling backlogs, arbitrary outcomes and new barriers to justice.

A handful of federal administrative programs, however, have quietly bucked this trend. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has created an administrative class action procedure, modeled after Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, to resolve “pattern and practice” claims of discrimination by federal employees before administrative judges. Similarly, the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has used “Omnibus Proceedings” resembling federal multidistrict litigation to pool common claims regarding vaccine injuries. And facing a backlog of hundreds of thousands of claims, the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals recently instituted a new “Statistical Sampling Initiative,” which will resolve hundreds of common medical claims at a time by statistically extrapolating the results of a few hearing outcomes.

This Article is the first to map agencies’ nascent efforts to use class actions and other complex procedures in their own hearings. Relying on unusual access to many agencies — including agency policymakers, staff and adjudicators — we take a unique look “inside” administrative tribunals that use mass adjudication in areas as diverse as employment discrimination, mass torts, and health care. In so doing, we unearth broader lessons about what aggregation procedures mean for policymaking, enforcement and adjudication. Even as some fear that collective procedures may stretch the limits of adjudication, our study supports a very different conclusion: group procedures can form an integral part of public regulation and the adjudicatory process itself.

The article is a culmination a project both Adam and Michael initiated with the publication of their article The Agency Class Action in 2012. Since then Adam and Michael were asked by the Administrative Conference of the United States to study the actual use of class action-type procedures in agency proceedings, which culminated in a report released this summer (for background, check out my JOTWELL submission here). The new draft article analyzes the results of that study. The article should be of great interest for mass tort practitioners, particularly those who litigate (or who contemplate litigating) in agencies in addition to courts. I cannot recommend it highly enough!

SJC