Xarelto® MDL Established in Louisiana

On December 12, 2014, the Federal Judicial Panel on Multi-District Litigation issued its Order consolidating all federal Xarelto® cases before Judge Edward Fallon sitting in the Eastern District of Louisiana. The consolidation litigation is caption In Re Xarelto® (Rivaroxaban) Products Liability Litigation and is commonly identified as MDL 2592. As a result, all cases filed or removed to federal court in which the plaintiff claims injury caused by Xarelto® are to be transferred to the MDL Court (E.D.LA) for pre-trial proceedings.

So what does this mean? Simply put, the MDL process is a federal court mechanism through which all cases – here all Xarelto® cases filed in or transferred to federal court - are assigned to a single Judge for centralized pre-trial adjudication including discovery (i.e. production of documents and taking of witness testimony), motion practice and disposition of overarching medical/science issues. Once this MDL process is complete, each individual case is then sent beck to the local federal court in which it was originally filed.

So for example, if a patient living in California files suit in federal court claiming that she was injured by Xarelto, her case will be transferred to the Judge Fallon for all pre-trial proceedings. Once those proceedings have been concluded, her case will be transferred back to California for trial.

Consolidation provides "economies of scale" for both plaintiffs and defendants, even though defendants often oppose such consolidation. With centralized production and review of documents and taking of testimony from defendants' fact witnesses and from both defendants' and plaintiffs' expert witnesses, the litigation process is more efficient and less costly.