Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation Issues Order on Hurricane Flood Claims
ORDER DENYING TRANSFER
Before the Panel: Plaintiffs in three actions pending in the
under 28 U.S.C. * 1407 to centralize pretrial proceedings in this litigation in the
Plaintiffs in two tag-along actions pending in the
On the basis of the papers filed and the hearing session held, we deny plaintiffs' motion.
These actions possess only a superficial factual commonality - all plaintiffs allege that they suffered property damage as a result of one or another of several hurricanes, and that their respective insurance companies breached the terms of plaintiffs' policies by settling plaintiffs' claims for amounts lower than the losses actually sustained. Each case necessarily involves a different property, different insureds, different witnesses, different proofs of loss, and different damages. The very nature of the cases ensures that unique issues concerning each plaintiff's loss, claim, investigation, and claim handling will predominate, and will overwhelm any efficiencies that centralization might achieve.
The widely varying procedural posture of the cases further weighs against centralization. In
four of the ten actions, discovery has either been completed or is scheduled to be completed by early July. The ostensibly related actions, too, are not all newly-filed cases. Eighteen of them were commenced in 2017. And thirteen others have been either dismissed via settlement or otherwise resolved, as have two of the original twelve constituent actions.4
IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED that the motion for centralization of these actions is denied.
PANEL ON MULTIDISTRICT LITIGATION
Chair
SCHEDULE A
NETKA v. FIRST
BATISTA, ET AL. v.
GUARDIOLA, ET AL. v.
AUNER, ET AL. v.
GUARDIOLA, ET AL. v.
WASSEN, ET AL. v.
SAMUELSON, ET AL. v.
SHELDON, ET AL. v.
CONNERS v. TOWER HILL PRIME INSURANCE COMPANY, C.A. No. 8:17-02937
PATE v.
1 As filed, the Section 1407 motion encompassed twelve actions, but two have since been settled and dismissed.
2 In addition,
3 These defendants are
4 These dismissals lend support to responding defendants' contention that very few of these cases are litigated through trial or require substantial judicial involvement. See In re: Brandywine Commc'ns Tech., LLC Patent Litig., 959 F. Supp. 2d 1377, 1378 (J.P.M.L. 2013)
(denying centralization because, inter alia, the subject actions were "being litigated in a manner that is likely to lead to their resolution, whether through settlement or other means, within a relatively short period of time").
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