What You Need to Know
Rule 16.1 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, titled
"Multidistrict Litigation," takes effect today, December
1, 2025. The adoption of this rule provides a long-awaited
framework specific to district courts' management of MDL
proceedings. However, many critics of the new rule are concerned
that it does not impose mandatory obligations on MDL courts, and
thus lacks the teeth required to establish meaningful change.
Background
MDLs are created when the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict
Litigation (JPML) transfers cases "involving one or more
common questions of fact ... to any district for coordinated or
consolidated pretrial proceedings."1 The number of
cases transferred into the MDL court depends on the litigation, but
the largest MDLs have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of
cases transferred for pretrial proceedings.
