Seventy percent of civil cases in federal court are in an MDL in 2024. Yet few people understand what an MDL is.
Multidistrict litigation, called an MDL, is a special legal procedure used in mass tort cases to streamline the handling of large and complex cases. An MDL is a “sort of” class action lawsuit. It is a class action in that the cases are all brought together under one judge for pretrial discovery.
However, typically, after a few bellwether trials of individual plaintiffs, the cases are sent back to their local jurisdiction for trial if a settlement is not reached. The hope of the MDL process is that the parties can figure out the value of the claims so a global settlement can be reached with most of the plaintiffs.
The idea of an MDL was born in 1968 when lawmakers created the MDL system as a way to speed up and coordinate complex litigation that was filed in multiple federal judicial districts. MDLs are utilized in scenarios where a single defendant or group of defendants commit a single tort or does a single act that affects a large group of people. When all of those individual people then go to sue the defendant, it makes more sense to consolidate their cases. This streamlines the process and avoids different rulings regarding similar aspects of the case.