“With the growth in US/English partnerships for bringing multi-claimant actions in England, there may be an increased interest in leveraging US discovery for copycat English claims. The larger mass torts become in the United States, the more likely they are to feed into related multi-claimant actions in England.”

Abstract: Recent court decisions have signaled the English courts’ willingness to embrace multi-claimant litigation and to broaden the types of questions decided on a collective basis. These developments have led UK-based plaintiffs’ lawyers to expand mass tort filings, including doing so in partnership with US plaintiffs’ lawyers who are actively advertising in England. This article provides an overview of multi-claimant litigation in England, highlights some of the factors that may lead to its increase, and discusses steps that companies operating in the English market can take now to manage potential exposure.

Three primary mechanisms for bringing collective actions before an English court:

1) Representative actions, group litigation orders (GLOs), and collective actions before the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT).

2) Representative actions, in their current form, and GLOs are products of the general Civil Procedure Rules (CPR).

3) Representative actions originated in the common law and permit a representative claimant or defendant with the “same interest” in a claim to represent that interest on behalf of a class.