Multi-district litigation is not the same thing as a class action. We represent injured consumers in individual lawsuits. When a pharmaceutical drug or medical device is defective, it typically causes the same type of injury to thousands of consumers. The legal issues are also similar. If these cases are filed in federal court, they are often soon “consolidated” in a multi-district litigation, or “MDL” before a single judge.
In an MDL, all of the information-gathering and investigation is done at the same time on behalf of all of the plaintiffs. The purpose of an MDL is to make it cheaper for individual plaintiffs by spreading the costs of information gathering. Once this process is finished, and the judge decides on issues that all of the plaintiffs share in common, each of the cases are sent back for trial, to the court where they were originally filed. Unlike class actions, MDL cases are tried individually. That is, each plaintiff gets his or her day in court, and if the drug or device company settles the cases before trial, they are settled individually, based on the measure of harm to each particular plaintiff.
We believe that bringing these injury cases individually instead of as a class action, is fairer, because:
- Each case is treated separately
- Injured people are compensated according to the severity of injury caused by the defendants
- The costs of bringing one lawsuit against a large corporation can be significant.
A big advantage to representing many individuals against the same companies, as we do, is that we can work more efficiently by spreading the costs of the lawsuits among several plaintiffs.
Our firm has been recognized on the national level and been appointed to several MDL committees:
- PPA Ischemic Stroke Daubert Hearing in the MDL court in Seattle, Washington, Mike Williams – Lead Counsel for the plaintiffs’
- NVIC Omnibus Petitioners Steering Committee - Mike Williams & Tom Powers Co-Chairs
- HT MDL Petitioners’ Steering Committee – Mike Williams co-chairs the science, management and governing committees
- Ephedra MDL Plaintiffs’ Coordinating Committee – Leslie O’Leary served on the PCC, authored the briefs for plaintiffs and appeared in the Daubert scientific hearings
- Diet Pill MDL 1203 Discovery Committee – Mike Williams
