I'm writing several times a day about products liability and class actions for Law.com/The National Law Journal. Occasionally I cross-post a blog I find particularly interesting.
With federal courts in New Jersey and the Eastern District of New York facing almost 2,000 cases in which insurers are being sued over Hurricane Sandy claims, one judge said that his court is focused on resolving cases.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ramon E. Reyes Jr. of the Eastern District of New York said he and other judges have asked plaintiffs’ lawyers and defense counsel to get cases ready in order to winnow them down to the most problematic.
What the next phase of litigation will look like after that process is still to be determined, Reyes said.
“I’m the type of judge that acknowledges that I don’t know it all … you folks are the experts. You have to educate me on the best way to handle these things,” Reyes said at a conference held last week about Sandy insurance litigation.
Earlier on, the Eastern District tried to “bucket cases involving the same legal issue, the same policy exclusions,” but lawyers advised that the cases were not ready to be organized that way, Reyes said.
On the one hand, some district judges were ready to start trials without discovery, but, on the other hand, “we were told point blank to forget about arbitration, that no carrier will go to arbitration,” Reyes said.
Now each side has 60 days to respond to n automated discovery process, Reyes said. And the court has a mediation training scheduled for the end of May.
Jared T. Greisman, the defense liaison counsel for Superstorm Sandy cases in the Eastern District and with White Fleischner & Fino in New York, said the Eastern District hopes to get mediations rolling in June.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Lois H. Goodman of the District of New Jersey said her court’s priority also is to get cases moving.
The New Jersey federal judges are aware that people were displaced from their homes and have a right to know if they are entitled to insurance recovery, Goodman said.
Mandatory discovery disclosure was set up for 30 days, Goodman said. “It was giving the attorneys heebie jeebies that we were going to make them go forward without the discovery,” she added.
The federal courts are viewing the process of mediating and settling cases as a way to winnow out cases and then get cases divided into “legal issue buckets,” said Tracey Rannals Bryan, the plaintiffs liaison counsel in the Eastern District and of Gauthier, Houghtaling & Williams, LLP, in Metairie, La.
Reyes said it will be important, once cases are categorized by legal issue, to have the same judges handle cases involving similar legal issues.
Otherwise, cases with conflicting results just wind “up in the circuit [court] and it just creates more work,” Reyes said.
Some of the Sandy litigation has involved class actions, including a lawsuit filed in 2012 accusing several insurance companies of wrongfully denying claims and misinterpreting the term “basement,” a lawsuit over the loss of power in Long Island, and an unsuccessful effort to certify a class about the loss of power in New York City.
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