Product Liability & Mass Tort Class Actions I. Executive Summary
As a general matter, product liability litigation can be divided into two categories, including claims that a product causes an injury, and claims that the label or advertising of a product is inaccurate or misleading. The first category usually is best suited to mass tort actions, and the second category often leads to class actions. Both class actions and mass torts (often brought in what is known as a multi-district litigation (MDL) are procedural tools used to manage and resolve mass tort or complex litigation cases involving multiple plaintiffs. While both mechanisms are designed to streamline the legal process, they differ in key aspects. In a class action, a single representative plaintiff (or a few) sues on behalf of a class of individuals who have similar claims against a defendant. The members of the class are typically numerous, but their claims are often similar, such as product liability or consumer fraud cases. The MDL proceeding is not a lawsuit itself but a procedural tool to centralize and manage pretrial proceedings when multiple similar cases are filed in different federal courts across the country. It involves the consolidation of cases with shared factual or legal issues. Another key difference is that for MDL proceedings, each individual case maintains its identity and representative plaintiffs do not represent a single consolidated class. Instead, it serves as a coordination of pretrial matters, such as discovery and motions, while cases are still separate. For these reasons, MDL proceedings are not required to go through the class certification process because each individual case maintains is own autonomy as the goal is to streamline pretrial issues related to discovery, for example, and not to create a unified class. With regard to settlement, in a class action the settlement is usually made on behalf of the entire class, whereas with MDL proceedings, each case may be required to undergo individual settlements, although, most times an MDL settlement arises from a common benefit fund. Mass tort actions often cannot satisfy the requirements of Rule 23, or similar state procedural laws, because the claim of injury involves individualized issues and plaintiff-specific circumstances, requiring individual proof of injury. For example, a mass tort claim may allege that ingestion of medication caused the plaintiffs to develop various types of cancer. The individual claims of different types of cancer, based upon plaintiffs’ unique social and medical histories, can be used to argue against class certification. However, while product injury cases are highly susceptible to opposition to class certification because of the individualized nature of the injury, such lawsuits can lend themselves to multi-district litigation and other coordinated proceedings that involve the same product, a similar set of operative facts, and the same defendants. Claims regarding labeling, however, often involve the exact same label across a broad range of individuals, and the injury claimed is often identical. Labeling-related cases may involve claims of consumer fraud, but injuries resulting from failing to disclose certain ingredients in the product for which that specific ingredient led to an injury may result in a successful certification motion. However, these types of class actions are of course highly dependent on the nature of the injury insofar as each individual still possesses a unique medical history which involves differing level of susceptibility to certain injuries and different levels of use to name a few differences across the class.
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Duane Morris Product Liability And Mass Torts Class Action Review – 2024
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