Friday, June 20, 2003

The 130 Virginians sued by DirecTV part of 5,000 lawsuits filed nationwide

As reported here, the DirecTV lawsuits filed across America number roughly 5,000. In May, I put up this post on the Virginia cases, which involve 130 defendants in 40 different suits in federal courts across the state.

Since they are all in federal court, it wouldn't surprise me if DirecTV tried to have them all consolidated via the multi-district litigation statutes, and see whether consumers were willing to show to fight out pre-trial motions in some district hundreds or thousands of miles from home.

That's sort of what happened in the UMWA Funds evergreen litigation in 1993, the trustees sued coal companies all over then got the cases transferred for pre-trial proceedings to the District of Columbia (and none made it back to where they were filed originally).

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