Diversity and Complexity in MDL Leadership: A Status Report from Case Management Orders

In multidistrict litigation, as elsewhere, personnel is policy. As MDL has become a major site for aggregate litigation, commentators have raised concerns that large-scale products liability cases are unduly influenced by a small cadre of elite lawyers whom courts repeatedly appointed to serve in the most powerful MDL leadership roles. Repeated appointments of these "repeat players, " commentators worry, facilitate self-dealing, suppress dissent, and aggravate conflicts of interest seen in other areas of aggregate litigation. These concerns about MDL overlap with broader concerns across the bench and bar about the degree to which white people and men dominate important leadership posts, to the exclusion of younger attorneys, women, LGBTQ+ people, and attorneys of color. In response to these concerns, prominent authorities urged MDL courts to adopt a number of reforms. They recommended that judges appoint leaders through open, competitive processes; create additional leadership posts and committees; and appoint leaders for limited terms in order to create more opportunities for new attorneys to participate in leadership. But, outside of a handful of highly publicized cases, we have little empirical evidence of whether MDL leadership appointments changed in the ways that reformers proposed. This Article-part of a larger, ongoing study of the nature andfunctions of MDL leaders and the MDL model of aggregate litigation-begins to fill that gap. Drawing on a dataset of thousands of filings and orders that were entered in sixty-eight products liability MDLs pending in June 2019, we report data on the size, composition, and appointment process for MDL leadership slates, and changes in the makeup of leadership slates in the eighteen-year period our dataset covers. Our data tentatively suggest that reformers' calls for larger, complex leadership slates and frequent competitive leadership appointment processes went unheeded. Examining trends in the size and structure of MDL leadership slates in products liability MDLs, we find little evidence that courts implemented the structural changes that the reformers suggested. Yet, while leadership appointment practices and the complexity of MDL leadership slates do not appear to have changed during the period we studied, we find intriguing changes in who is being appointed to leadership posts. Slightly less than a quarter of leadership appointments in our data went to female attorneys, suggestive of only a trivial increase i