Which Court is the Right Court?
04/15/09One of the first challenges in handling an aviation case is to determine where the lawsuit should be filed to best serve the client’s interests. At Slack & Davis, our goal is to identify a court where all of the necessary defendants can be joined and where the case can proceed quickly and efficiently. This decision can make the difference between a case being resolved quickly in a matter of months, or languishing for years.
That analysis requires a careful, client-specific comparison of state and federal court options. At Slack & Davis we carefully analyze all options and review our recommendations with the client before the lawsuit is filed. We do not follow the trend regarding where cases are being filed by other lawyers and we do not automatically file in federal court. Our filing recommendation is made based upon client interests and nothing else.
Over the years, most commercial aviation disaster cases have ended up in federal court due to the diversity of citizenship between the claimants and the defendants. The federal cases get assigned to a single judge during the pretrial phase through a process known as “multidistrict litigation” or “MDL.” The MDL process has the commendable purpose of centralizing cases so that common issues can be addressed before cases are sent back to their original federal courts. In recent years, however, the MDL process has been very slow and inefficient – often adding years to the resolution time of cases. It is certain that any airline passenger case filed in federal court will be assigned to a federal MDL court. That is inevitable.
Consequently, Slack & Davis explores all state court filing options for a faster, more expedient means of resolving their clients’ cases. In most state courts, a scheduling order and trial setting can be obtained soon after the case is filed. Hearings can be obtained in state courts much faster than in federal court. These features put the case on a much quicker and more efficient track to resolution. While the airline defendants will ask the state court to “slow down” the state case and not allow it to proceed faster than the cases pending in the federal MDL court, this argument is usually rejected by state judges who view themselves as an expedient alternative to federal jurisdiction.
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