Repeat Players in Multidistrict Litigation: The Social Network

As class certification wanes, plaintiffs’ lawyers resolve hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits through aggregate settlements in multidistrict litigation. But without class actions, formal rules are scarce and judges rarely scrutinize the private agreements that result. Meanwhile, the same principal-agent concerns that plagued class-action attorneys linger. These circumstances are ripe for exploitation: few rules, little oversight, multi-million dollar common-benefit fees, and a push for settlement can tempt a cadre of repeat players to fill in the gaps in ways that further their own self-interest. Although multidistrict litigation now comprises 36 percent of the entire federal civil caseload, legal scholars have offered little sustained theoretical or empirical analysis as to how repeat players’ enforcement efforts shape litigation or claims resolution. We wade into this increasingly controversial territory to offer the first comprehensive empirical investigation of private attorneys’ efforts in multidistrict leadership on both the plaintiff and defense side. We found that transferee judges regularly appoint the same lead attorneys. To then uncover what the naked eye cannot see, we employed a social-network analysis to reveal repeat actors’ connections to one another. No matter what measure of centrality we used, a key group of attorneys maintained their elite position within the network. This matters considerably, for lead lawyers control the proceeding and negotiate settlements. They can bargain for what may matter to them most: defendants want to end lawsuits, and plaintiffs’ lawyers want to recover for their clients and receive high fee awards along the way. By identifying settlement provisions that one might argue principally benefit the repeat players, we examined the publicly available nonclass settlements these elite lawyers designed. Over a 22-year span, we were unable to find any deal that didn’t feature at least one closure provision for defendants, and likewise found that nearly all settlements contained some provision that increased lead plaintiffs’ lawyers’ common-benefit fees. Bargaining for attorneys’ fees with one’s opponent is a stark departure from traditional contingent-fee principles, which are designed to tie lawyers’ fees to their clients’ outcome. Based on the evidence available to us, we found reason to be concerned that when repeat players influence the practices and norms that govern multidistrict proceedings — when they “play for rules,” so to speak — the rules they develop may principally benefit them at the expense of one-shot plaintiffs

Perceptions of Justice in Multidistrict Litigation: Voices from the Crowd

With all eyes on criminal justice reform, multidistrict litigation (MDL) has quietly reshaped civil justice, undermining fundamental tenets of due process, procedural justice, attorney ethics, and tort law along the way. In 2020, the MDL caseload tripled that of the federal criminal caseload, one out of every two cases filed in federal civil court was an MDL case, and 97% of those were products liability like opioids, talc, and Roundup. Ordinarily, civil procedure puts tort plaintiffs in the driver’s seat, allowing them to choose who and where to sue, and what claims to bring. Procedural justice tells courts to ensure plaintiffs can present evidence, participate, and tell their story—or risk inaccurate outcomes and judicial illegitimacy. But MDL’s efficiency mantra trumps all, transferring plaintiffs with related facts away from their preferred venue, centralizing their cases with hundreds of others before a judge in a faraway forum, replacing their chosen attorneys with a judicially selected roster of lead lawyers, depersonalizing plaintiffs’ narratives, and settling their cases en masse. Though MDL makes them feel like “just another number,” one-shot plaintiffs can say little in response: many are sick, bankrupt, and silenced by private settlements’ confidentiality provisions.No longer. In conducting the first ever MDL procedural justice study, we spoke with plaintiffs from 42 different states with diverse backgrounds, educations, and races. Their cases originated in 32 different state and federal courts, and 295 lawyers from 145 law firms represented them. Although 54% of their attorneys (or someone from their firm) led the MDLs, lawyers did little for the clients they stockpiled. When it came to their attorney experience, 64% of participants were somewhat or deeply dissatisfied, 50% did not feel that they could trust their attorney, 59% received few or no status updates, and 67% did not understand what was happening with their lawsuit. Nor did MDLs feel efficient or accessible. They lasted almost four times as long as the average civil case, with 73% of respondents finding the delay unreasonable and only 1.3% ever attending a hearing. And yet, nearly 60% would have been willing to wait longer to tell their story—some up to five years more. Without those opportunities for input, only 25% thought claims administrators possessed or relied on accurate information, which raises questions about accuracy, substantive outcomes, and the system’s ability to fulfill tort-law objectives. And though plaintiffs had many goals, from compensation to protecting others to holding corporations accountable, a mere 1.8% of all participants felt their lawsuit accomplished what they hoped. One put it simply, “Our judicial process is very broken.” MDL needs reform. We ignite the discussion with proposals to increase transparency through mandatory public closing statements that reveal attorneys’ fees, costs, and settlement amounts; voice, access, and accuracy through the public’s newfound familiarity with technology; and due process by appointing separate lead lawyers to represent plaintiffs with conflicting interests

Repeat Players in Multidistrict Litigation: The Social Network

As class certification wanes, plaintiffs’ lawyers resolve hundreds of thousands of individual lawsuits through aggregate settlements in multidistrict litigation. But without class actions, formal rules are scarce and judges rarely scrutinize the private agreements that result. Meanwhile, the same principal- agent concerns that plagued class-action attorneys linger. These circumstances are ripe for exploitation: few rules, little oversight, multi-million dollar common-benefit fees, and a push for settlement can tempt a cadre of repeat players to fill in the gaps in ways that further their own self-interest. Although multidistrict litigation now comprises 36% of the pending federal civil caseload, legal scholars have offered little sustained theoretical or empirical analysis as to how repeat players’ enforcement efforts shape litigation or claims resolution. We wade into this increasingly controversial territory to offer the first comprehensive empirical investigation of private attorneys’ efforts in multidistrict leadership on both the plaintiff and defense side. We found that transferee judges regularly appoint the same lead attorneys. To then uncover what the naked eye cannot see, we employed a social-network analysis to reveal repeat actors’ connections to one another. No matter what measure of centrality we used, a key group of attorneys maintained their elite position within the network. This matters considerably, for lead lawyers control the proceeding and negotiate settlements. They can bargain for what may matter to them most: defendants want to end lawsuits, and plaintiffs’ lawyers want to recover for their clients and receive high fee awards along the way. By identifying settlement provisions that one might argue principally benefit the repeat players, we examined the publicly available nonclass settlements these elite lawyers designed. Over a twenty-two-year span, we were unable to find any deal that did not feature at least one closure provision for defendants, and likewise found that nearly all settlements contained some provision that increased lead plaintiffs’ lawyers’ common-benefit fees. Bargaining for attorneys’ fees with one’s opponent is a stark departure from traditional contingent- fee principles, which are designed to tie lawyers’ fees to their clients’ outcome. Based on the evidence available to us, we found reason to be concerned that when repeat players influence the practices and norms that govern multidistrict proceedings—when they “play for rules,” so to speak—the rules they develop may principally benefit them at the expense of one-shot plaintiffs

Judicial Adjuncts in Multidistrict Litigation

Peeking under the tent of our nation\u27s largest and often most impactful cases reveals that judges often act like ringmasters: They delegate their authority to a wide array of magistrate judges, special masters, and settlement administrators. Some, like the American Bar Association, see this as a plus that promotes efficiency and cost savings. Critics, however, contend that delegating judicial power especially to private citizens, removes adjudication from public scrutiny, injects thorny ethical questions about ex parte communications, and risks cronyism and high costs. By constructing an original dataset of ninety-two multidistrict products liability proceedings centralized over fourteen years, we introduce the first taxonomy of the diverse adjuncts working within them. Testing adjuncts\u27 effects with a multivariate analysis, we found that proceedings with special masters lasted 66% longer than those without, and appointing any kind of adjunct meant that the proceeding was 43% less likely to end. Not only did justice take longer it cost more: 74% of the adjuncts were not magistrate judges, meaning that the parties paid them. Digging deeper we interviewed some of the lawyers, judges, and adjuncts who participated in these proceedings. Attorneys\u27 experiences moved scholars\u27 concerns from law review pages to real life: Rather than improving justice, some adjuncts cajole parties through off-the-record discussions; repeat players tap one another for business; and plaintiffs\u27 outcomes may depend more on whether they picked an attorney with the inside track than their suits\u27 merits. Collectively, our findings support existing reservations about allocating judicial power to those in the private secto

Leg Injuries To Coyotes Captured In Standard And Modified Soft Catch® Traps

Leg injuries of coyotes (Canis latrans) captured in standard No. 3 Soft Catch traps were compared with those captured in the same trap type modified with two additional coil springs. One hundred thirteen coyotes were trapped in southern California in conjunction with livestock predator control operations, 53 in standard traps, and 60 in modified traps. Observed injuries were similar in both trap types. The most frequent injuries were edematous hemorrhages and small cutaneous lacerations. Injuries, such as joint luxations and bone fractures, were noted more frequently for coyotes trapped in standard Soft Catch traps

Axonal stress kinase activation and tau misbehavior induced by kinesin-1 transport defects

Many neurodegenerative diseases exhibit axonal pathology, transport defects, and aberrant phosphorylation and aggregation of the microtubule binding protein tau. While mutant tau protein in frontotemporal dementia and parkinsonism linked to chromosome 17 (FTDP17) causes aberrant microtubule binding and assembly of tau into filaments, the pathways leading to tau-mediated neurotoxicity in Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders in which tau protein is not genetically modified remain unknown. To test the hypothesis that axonal transport defects alone can cause pathological abnormalities in tau protein and neurodegeneration in the absence of mutant tau or amyloid β deposits, we induced transport defects by deletion of the kinesin light chain 1 (KLC1) subunit of the anterograde motor kinesin-1. We found that upon aging, early selective axonal transport defects in mice lacking the KLC1 protein (KLC1-/-) led to axonopathies with cytoskeletal disorganization and abnormal cargo accumulation. In addition, increased c-jun N-terminal stress kinase activation colocalized with aberrant tau in dystrophic axons. Surprisingly, swollen dystrophic axons exhibited abnormal tau hyperphosphorylation and accumulation. Thus, directly interfering with axonal transport is sufficient to activate stress kinase pathways initiating a biochemical cascade that drives normal tau protein into a pathological state found in a variety of neurodegenerative disorders including Alzheimer's disease.Fil: Falzone, Tomas Luis. Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Estados Unidos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; ArgentinaFil: Stokin, Gorazd B.. University Psychiatric Hospital; EsloveniaFil: Lillo, Concepción. University of California at San Diego; Estados UnidosFil: Rodrigues, Elizabeth M.. Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Estados UnidosFil: Westerman, Eileen L.. Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Estados UnidosFil: Williams, David S.. University of California at San Diego; Estados UnidosFil: Goldstein, Lawrence S. B.. Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Estados Unido

Importance of coastal change variables in determining vulnerability to sea- and lake-level change

This paper is not subject to U.S. copyright. The definitive version was published in Journal of Coastal Research 26 (2010): 176-183, doi:10.2112/08-1102.1.In 2001, the U.S. Geological Survey began conducting scientific assessments of coastal vulnerability to potential future sea- and lake-level changes in 22 National Park Service sea- and lakeshore units. Coastal park units chosen for the assessment included a variety of geological and physical settings along the U.S. Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Alaska, Caribbean, and Great Lakes shorelines. This research is motivated by the need to understand and anticipate coastal changes caused by accelerating sea-level rise, as well as lake-level changes caused by climate change, over the next century. The goal of these assessments is to provide information that can be used to make long-term (decade to century) management decisions. Here we analyze the results of coastal vulnerability assessments for several coastal national park units. Index-based assessments quantify the likelihood that physical changes may occur based on analysis of the following variables: tidal range, ice cover, wave height, coastal slope, historical shoreline change rate, geomorphology, and historical rate of relative sea- or lake-level change. This approach seeks to combine a coastal system's susceptibility to change with its natural ability to adapt to changing environmental conditions, and it provides a measure of the system's potential vulnerability to the effects of sea- or lake-level change. Assessments for 22 park units are combined to evaluate relationships among the variables used to derive the index. Results indicate that Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico parks have the highest vulnerability rankings relative to other park regions. A principal component analysis reveals that 99% of the index variability can be explained by four variables: geomorphology, regional coastal slope, water-level change rate, and mean significant wave height. Tidal range, ice cover, and historical shoreline change are not as important when the index is evaluated at large spatial scales (thousands of kilometers)

Synthesis and Secretion of Apolipoprotein E by Cultured Human Keratinocytes

Non-polar lipids are synthesized by keratinocytes in the epidermis and transported to the extracellular space where they contribute to formation of a permeability barrier. Transport of non-polar lipids in other organs and tissues usually occurs with the lipid complexed to an apolipoprotein. In this study we set out to learn if apolipoprotein E is produced by human epidermal keratinocytes in culture. Analysis of tota' cellular RNA from cultured keratinocytes showed the presence of human apolipoprotein E mRNA at concentrations ranging from 2.5 to 35 molecules/cell. The cells secrete a protein identified as apo E on the basis of molecular weight, isoform pattern, and immunoreactivity. Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay of media from keratinocyte cultures indicated that apolipoprotein E is secreted at a rate of 0.92 ng/h/106 cells