Mass torts, or mass tort litigation, refers to civil lawsuits that involve numerous plaintiffs, all alleging injuries caused by the same product, medication, or event. Unlike class action lawsuits brought on behalf of a group of people, mass torts consist of hundreds or thousands of individual personal injury or wrongful death lawsuits consolidated for efficiency and consistency.
The injuries in mass tort cases are widespread and significant in scope, with defendants typically large corporations with vast legal and financial resources. Some of the most notable mass tort cases in recent decades have involved dangerous products like asbestos, defective medical devices like hip implants, and unsafe pharmaceuticals like diet drugs.
Environmental disasters and toxic spills have also generated significant mass torts. As these large-scale injuries and controversies become more common in our complex global economy, Mass Tort 101 is rising as an avenue for seeking justice and compensation. For those new to the concept, here is a beginner’s guide to the unique world of mass torts.
What Qualifies as a Mass Tort?
For civil litigation to be considered a mass tort, it must meet several key criteria:
- Numerous plaintiffs allege the same or very similar injuries, typically numbering in the hundreds or thousands.
- The injuries resulted from the same product, medication, industrial accident, environmental disaster, or other single source.
- The damages incurred are widespread and significant in overall scope, though they may vary individually.
- The defendants are most often major corporations with abundant legal and financial resources.
Some examples of qualifying mass tort cases include asbestos exposure across multiple job sites, unintended acceleration in a popular car model, a commonly prescribed drug causing adverse health effects, or groundwater contamination sickening an entire town. The unfolding opioid addiction crisis has also given rise to mass tort litigation in recent years. While individual details may differ between plaintiffs, the core allegations of injury and causation connect their cases.
Unique Features of Mass Tort Litigation
Because aggregating hundreds or thousands of individual lawsuits would overwhelm the court system, unique processes have evolved to streamline mass tort cases:
- Multidistrict litigation (MDL) – Similar cases from federal courts across the country are consolidated for pretrial proceedings before a single judge. However, cases return to their original courts for trial.
- Bellwether trials – A representative sample of cases is taken through complete discovery and trial to establish evidence and outcomes likely to influence future settlement negotiations.
- Common benefit funds – Defendants pay a percentage of any settlements into a common fund to compensate the lead attorneys who invested significant resources in developing the case.
- Settlement matrices – Compensation categories are established, matching the severity of injuries with dollar amounts, which are applied in a grid.
- Trust funds – Settlements often involve the creation of trust funds managed by independent administrators to pay current and ongoing future claims.
Stages of a Mass Tort Case
The life cycle of a typical mass tort case involves multiple phases:
- Attorneys and law firms conduct investigations to identify potential widespread injuries and recruit clients through advertising and outreach.
- Individual plaintiffs file personal injury or wrongful death lawsuits against the defendants in courts nationwide.
- If enough similarities exist, the cases are petitioned for consolidation into a multidistrict litigation assigned to a single judge.
- In the MDL, discovery proceeds, including interrogatories, depositions, document production, and expert testimony to develop evidence. Both sides hire specialists.
- Many bellwether trials are conducted, which establish the defendants’ liability and causation burden, as well as frameworks for determining plaintiff damages.
- Global settlement negotiations then take place to resolve the remaining consolidated cases using the bellwether outcomes as a guide. Compensation categories and amounts are established.
- An administrator is chosen to distribute settlement funds to eligible claimants per the negotiated terms and matrices. Medical monitoring programs may also be funded. Defendants earn litigation peace.
Benefits of Mass Tort Settlements
Reaching a mass tort settlement has significant advantages:
- It provides an efficient resolution for large groups of plaintiffs who likely could not afford to keep fighting individual cases through trial.
- The settlement avoids further litigation costs, risks, and delays for both sides. Witnesses would also undergo repeat depositions and testimony.
- Defendants can cap their overall liability and move on from the issue with their brands or reputations intact.
- Plaintiffs receive compensation faster than they would be waiting for preparation and trials in individual suits.
- The court system benefits by reducing the logjam of hearing hundreds or thousands of repetitive injury cases.
Of course, compromises are required on both sides in the interest of resolution. Settlements also do not officially determine legal accountability, though defendants typically want confidentiality and to avoid admissions of fault. Nonetheless, the benefits often outweigh continued litigation.
Challenges in Mass Tort Litigation
These sprawling cases also pose many challenges, including:
- Coordinating large groups of plaintiffs’ attorneys and integrating their clients’ interests into a unified strategy requires intensive organization and leadership.
- Litigating mass tort cases demands extensive resources, with costs running into millions for top experts, evidence analysis, discovery, trial preparation, and more.
- Negotiating a comprehensive settlement that provides fair compensation for plaintiffs with varying types and degrees of injury is complex.
- Structuring payouts over long time horizons, as some diseases manifest years after exposure, is difficult.
- Defendants are reluctant to admit awareness or fault, which limits settlement options publicly.
Judges and attorneys invested in managing mass torts must be strategic legal thinkers who can navigate all sides toward resolution. Achieving justice amid such scale and complexity is daunting.
Looking to the Future
Given the rise of mass products, medications, and environmental issues that affect large populations, mass tort litigation will likely increase to hold companies accountable and compensate victims.
Emerging litigation is already flowing from the opioid crisis, climate change impacts, and technological innovations gone wrong, among other modern issues. As global commerce and economies grow more complex and interconnected, so will the web of affected people and parties in potential mass tort scenarios.
Corporations have already begun lobbying for tighter restrictions on tort lawsuits and caps on damages through proposed reforms. There are also discussions around reforms to the MDL process and class action rules.
Mass torts reflect major controversies of their times, and the future will likely bring new forms of widespread harm we cannot yet imagine. Understanding their primary processes and stakes is useful preparation for an engaged citizenry.