At any given time, there are a variety of mass torts pending in US courts. A mass tort is essentially a personal injury lawsuit involving hundreds to thousands, to tens-of-thousands to in some cases hundreds-of-thousands of claimants (e.g., the 3M earplug mass tort), against a single or few defendants. The defendant(s) produced a drug or consumer product or offered a service that harmed many individuals and in a mass tort, those many injured individuals join together to sue the defendant(s) for damages. 

While similar, mass torts are not class actions. If you think you have a potential class action, contact us via our general contact form. If, however, there is a specific drug or product that injured you and for which there is an already existing mass tort, please fill out our contact form specific to that product or drug to see if we can help you join the mass tort against the manufacturer of that drug or product. 

What are mass torts and how are they different than class actions?

Mass torts, simply put, are personal injury actions involving many claimants/plaintiffs against a common wrongdoer. Mass torts are a type of aggregate litigation, the most common of which historically has been the class action. Class actions can and have been used to deal with a wide variety of legal issues; for example, the landmark school desegregation case which resulted in the Brown v. Board of Education decision (347 U.S. 483 (1954)) was brought as a class action. In recent decades, however, this ancient process appeared to be the obvious way to deal with a relatively new phenomenon, the mass tort. Traditionally, torts arose from idiosyncratic events where a single injured plaintiff sues a defendant alleged to have wrongfully caused the injury. Mass torts, however, arise when one product is allegedly the cause of injuries to large numbers of people, or one catastrophic event (such as a chemical leak) causes widespread harm.

At first glance, use of class actions to resolve disputes where dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people allege the same event or product caused similar injuries to all of them seems to be an ideal procedure.  However, in the late 1990s it appeared the class action would not be useful in resolving mass torts, because despite each individual claim sharing many common issues of fact and law, there were also significant differences between claims. For example, one set of mass torts were the claims arising from asbestos exposure, in particular among those exposed in the workplace in such environments as shipyards.  In the 1990s, thousands of such disparate asbestos claims were assigned as a group to one federal judge, but they were not formally aggregated in any way. Lawyers who had formed an informal committee for all the plaintiffs south to have a class certified for the sole purpose of approving a global settlement of all the plaintiffs’ claims. The Supreme Court, however, held this class was impermissible because common issues did not predominate.  The Court noted that the members of the class were exposed to different types of asbestos-containing products, in different ways, over different periods, and for different amounts of time, and the harms they suffered varied widely.

The limitations on class action lawsuits for mass torts led to the massive growth in the collective action known as Multi-District Litigation (“MDL”), established in 28 U.S.C. § 1407.  This procedure aggregates cases with similar claims, most obviously mass tort claims, in one proceeding for pretrial matters, from discovery up to and through dispositive motions, but contemplates individual trials for each claimant. Most of the claims joined in MDL, however, are settled, and there are no trials.  Still, within these MDLs, class action procedures often are brought back into play, particular the creation of settlement classes.  One large MDL can proceed through discovery, and perhaps be split into several different settlement classes in recognition of the difference between some of the claims.  When time comes to present the settlement that the lead counsel in the MDL proceeding have been negotiating, the judge presiding over that MDL can approve various classes solely for the purpose of allowing the litigants to approve the settlement or to opt out of the class and proceed on their own to trial.

Today, MDLs, often using elements of a class action such as certifying settlement classes, dominate the federal courts’ docket. The total number of MDL actions pending as of May 16, 2022 was 185, but each contains hundreds or, in some cases, thousands, of individual constituent actions.  In all, the number of cases on the federal docket that are currently joined into an MDL is 428,414.  Meanwhile, the total number of active cases, civil and criminal, pending in the federal district courts as of the date of official records being complied in 2021 was only 711,778, so well over half the total cases in the federal system are part of an MDL. The issues range from patent to antitrust to securities claims, but the majority are mass torts. As our society grows more interconnected and dependent on complex technology, such forms of aggregate litigation are likely to continue to thrive and increase.

If you have been injured by any of the drugs or products listed on this webpage, contact us at JectonMistedWings to see if you qualify to join a mass tort against the manufacturer of the drug or product that injured you.