Full piece in the Wall Street Journal

By the Editorial Board

The tort bar has attacked companies with a thousand legal strategies, but one of the most abusive is multidistrict litigation (MDL), which extorts companies into huge settlements. Now a new Federal Rule of Civil Procedure adopted by the Judicial Conference of the U.S. will discourage some of the litigation abuse that mars mass torts.

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One MDL abuse has been the ability of trial lawyers to gather huge plaintiff groups without first having to establish a factual basis for the individual claims. In the MDL action against Merck & Co.’s painkiller Vioxx, almost a third of injury claims were unsubstantiated.

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The limitless blob of MDLs has long needed more structure for processing which claims have merit. In a February 2024 letter to the Judicial Conference Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure, more than 50 companies said “unexamined and unsupported claims” created ongoing problems in the “management and resolution of mass-tort multidistrict litigation proceedings.”

Many of the claims asserted in mass-tort MDLs, they wrote, “do not, upon examination, satisfy the most basic elements, including whether the plaintiff was exposed to the alleged cause of harm.”

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Civil-justice reform is an eternal battle because trial lawyers own so many politicians and profit from a system that favors plaintiffs over defendants. The tort bar may not love the new rule, but it is good news for everyone else.