Protecting Consumers & Clients - Center on the Legal Profession

Protecting Consumers and Clients

The Challenge: Making Litigation Work for Consumers and Clients

The civil legal system is experiencing fundamental transformation, new challenges, and immense opportunity—including a yawning access-to-justice gap and an influx of technology into centuries-old systems. A necessary challenge, amid those and other changes, is ensuring that large-scale litigation continues to achieve its goals: deterring harm, informing the public, and, where relevant, compensating victims fairly.

The Rhode Center is dedicated to a rigorous assessment of whether and how the legal system and the actors within it protect clients and consumers, particularly those entangled in complex litigation. Our Transparency in Litigation project is a first-of-its-kind, large-scale empirical research project to explore the role of protective orders, motions to seal, and secret settlements within the American legal system. And our work on Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) seeks to gather stakeholders and conduct and publish research to illuminate the benefits and drawbacks of MDL—and specifically to improve the MDL experience for the plaintiffs involved.

SEE RHODE CENTER PUBLICATIONS ON PROTECTING CONSUMERS & CLIENTS HERE

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Transparency in Litigation

Legislatures and courts have begun to pare back litigation secrecy. The Rhode Center is mounting a major, first-of-its-kind empirical research project to explore the role of protective orders, motions to seal, and secret settlements within the American legal system.

Multidistrict Litigation

The Rhode Center has turned its focus to multidistrict litigation (MDL), a procedural vehicle that consolidates similar federal claims into single “transferee” courts. MDLs currently contain more than 400,000 active claims in federal court.

Judicial Management of Mass Tort Cases

Multidistrict litigation presents a microcosm of phenomena rippling through the broader civil justice system: managerial judging, increasing use of technology, and efforts to promote efficiency and preserve judicial capacity.

Related Publications

Plaintiffs and Attorneys in Multidistrict Litigation: Strengths, Deficits, and Paths Forward

Harnessing Common Benefit Fees to Promote MDL Integrity

Toward the Participatory MDL: A Low-Tech Step to Promote Litigant Autonomy

Additional Resources

We would be reckless were we to ignore litigant satisfaction. Public confidence in our system of justice depends on the system’s responsiveness to people’s needs.

Public perceptions of the fairness of the judicial process in handling mass torts—and particularly those involving pharmaceuticals with potential widespread health consequences—are a significant aspect of these complex national litigations involving thousands of parties.

Steps should be taken to ensure that courts provide individual justice, even in a mass context.