Over the past few years, a number of plaintiffs’ lawyers have attempted—with some success—to circumvent the “mass action” provisions in the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), which allow defendants to remove to federal court certain cases raising “claims of 100 or more persons that are proposed to be tried jointly.” 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(11)(B)(i).  Although these lawyers represent 100-plus clients with substantively identical claims, they subdivide their mass actions into multiple parallel cases, often with just under 100 plaintiffs each.  And to avoid the “proposed to be tried jointly” language of CAFA, they remain coy about—or sometimes deny—any intention to try the cases jointly.  Instead, they toe up to the joint trial line by seeking to have the cases treated together for as many purposes as possible short of directly calling for a joint trial.  But an en banc decision by the Ninth Circuit earlier this week represents a welcome step towards limiting such efforts to evade federal jurisdiction.

That en banc decision springs from a pair of cases we discussed last December: Romo v. Teva Phamaceuticals USA, Inc., and its companion case, Corber v. Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals, Inc.—in which a divided panel approved the remand of 40 just-under-100-plaintiff cases as to which plaintiffs had invoked a California state-law procedure that allows for coordination of complex civil actions “for all purposes.”  Although the plaintiffs did not limit their coordination request to pretrial proceedings, the panel majority held that that the plaintiffs’ request was insufficient to trigger removal, effectively requiring that plaintiffs expressly request a single joint trial before defendants may remove a mass action under CAFA.  Judge Gould dissented; in his view, the practical result of plaintiffs’ proposal for coordination was dispositive—rather than whether plaintiffs had used the magic words of asking for a joint trial.

As we noted in a blog post last February, the Ninth Circuit had granted rehearing en banc in both Romo and Corber to resolve the circuit split that the panel had created with the Seventh Circuit’s decision in In re Abbott Laboratories, Inc. and the Eighth Circuit’s decision in Atwell v. Boston Scientific Corp.

This week, the en banc Court (pdf)—adopting a pragmatic approach to what counts as a “joint trial” for purposes of CAFA—held that the defendants had properly removed the cases.  Writing for the Court this time, Judge Gould agreed with the Seventh and Eighth Circuits that a proposal for a joint trial may be made implicitly as well as explicitly.  The Court explained that although a rule requiring the plaintiffs to invoke the magic words “joint trial” “would be easy to administer,” the problem with that rule is that it “would ignore the real substance” of plaintiffs’ proposals and how the mass actions were likely to be litigated in practice.  And the Court observed that, as a practical matter, plaintiffs’ request to coordinate all of the cases “for all purposes”—and their arguments before the state court that coordination was needed to avoid “the danger of inconsistent judgments and conflicting determinations of liability”—was a request for a joint trial.

That holding is good news for defendants facing mass actions in the Ninth Circuit.  That said, we would have liked to see the Ninth Circuit go further to curb the attempts by plaintiffs’ lawyers to circumvent CAFA.  Amici argued in Romo/Corber—as we have also contended—that the Supreme Court’s admonition in Standard Fire Insurance Co. v. Knowles not to “exalt form over substance” in assessing CAFA jurisdiction forecloses plaintiffs’ lawyers from gerrymandering their 100-plus clients into parallel smaller actions.

Equally troubling, the Ninth Circuit left open the possibility that plaintiffs may be able to evade CAFA by asserting that their request for coordination is “intended to be solely for pre-trial purposes.”  In our view, that distinction is likely to prove illusory in practice:  Even if plaintiffs never formally move to coordinate or consolidate parallel cases all the way through trial, the cases would still effectively be tried jointly because the judgment in the first action might well have preclusive effect on the trials in any subsequent actions, which surely would be presided over by the same judge and involve similar witnesses and evidence.  As the Seventh and Eighth Circuits have made clear in Abbott Labs and Atwell, even a single-plaintiff trial may qualify as a joint trial if the intent is to use it as a bellwether trial on liability or for preclusive effect in subsequent trials.

The fight over this issue is far from over:  Plaintiffs’ lawyers will continue to subdivide their mass actions artificially to avoid federal jurisdiction, and defendants will seek to convince federal courts that such slicing-and-dicing is improper under CAFA.  Nonetheless, the Ninth Circuit’s willingness to take—as the court of appeals itself said—a more “realistic” view of mass actions is a step in the right direction.