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Full-Text Articles in Law
Efficiency At The Price Of Accuracy: The Case For Assigning Mdls To Multiple Districts And Circuits, Isaak Elkind
Efficiency At The Price Of Accuracy: The Case For Assigning Mdls To Multiple Districts And Circuits, Isaak Elkind
Vanderbilt Law Review
28 U.S.C. § 1407 allows for the centralization of unique cases into a single forum for pretrial purposes. The product is multidistrict litigation, known colloquially as the “MDL.” While initially conceived as a means of increasing efficiency for only particularly massive, complex litigation, MDLs have become pervasive. Today, over fifteen percent of all civil litigation—and fifty percent of all federal civil litigation—is consolidated into MDLs. Yet, MDLs are commonly overconsolidated, such that only one judge presides over hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of individual cases at a time. Fewer than three percent of such cases return to their …
Distributing Attorney Fees In Multidistrict Litigation, Edward K. Cheng, Paul H. Edelman, Brian T. Fitzpatrick
Distributing Attorney Fees In Multidistrict Litigation, Edward K. Cheng, Paul H. Edelman, Brian T. Fitzpatrick
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
As consolidated multidistrict litigation has come to dominate the federal civil docket, the problem of how to divide attorney fees among participating firms has become the source of frequent and protracted litigation. For example, in the National Football League (NFL) Concussion Litigation, the judge awarded the plaintiff attorneys over $100 million in fees, but the division of those fees among the twenty-six firms involved sparked two additional years of litigation. We explore solutions to this fee division problem, drawing insights from the economics, game theory, and industrial organization literatures. Ultimately, we propose a novel division method based on peer reports. …