MDLs are supposed to follow the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  That’s the reminder the Sixth Circuit gave in In re National Prescription Opiate Litigation, 956 F.3d 838, 844 (6th Cir. 2020):

[T]he law governs an MDL court’s decisions just as it does a court’s decisions in any other case. . . .  Here, the relevant law takes the form of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.  Promulgated pursuant to the Rules Enabling Act, those Rules are binding upon court and parties alike, with fully the force of law. . . .  Respectfully, the district court’s mistake was to think it had authority to disregard the Rules’ requirements . . . in favor of enhancing the efficiency of the MDL as a whole. . . .  But MDLs are not some kind of judicial border country, where the rules are few and the law rarely makes an appearance.  For neither §1407 nor Rule 1 remotely suggests that, whereas the Rules are law in individual cases, they are merely hortatory in MDL ones.

Id. at  844 (citations omitted).  More recently the Civil Rules Committee made the same point in approving new Fed. R. Civ. P. 16.1:  “The Rules of Civil Procedure, including the pleading rules, continue to apply in all MDL proceedings.”  Comment to Rule 16.1(b)(3)(A).

Bad things happen – usually to defendants – when an MDL adopts practices designed to cut procedural corners that the drafters of the rules put there for a reason.Continue Reading MDL Procedural Shortcuts Once Again Disadvantage Defendants