When several individual lawsuits arising out of the same basic facts are filed in multiple federal courts, the cases can be coordinated into one district court. This process is known as multidistrict litigation, and the coordinated action is referred to as an MDL.

The judge in an MDL oversees all pretrial activities, just like a class action, and achieves many of the same efficiencies. Unlike a class action, however, an MDL preserves the individual’s claim separately – there is no class or class representative, just hundreds or even thousands of individual lawsuits assigned to one judge for pretrial proceedings.