Editor's Note: This article was written by Kim Gale at Top Class Actions and is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher. Scott Hardy, the company's President & CEO, is one of the speakers featured at HB's Class Action Mastery conference May 9-11, 2018 in New York. Top Class Actions is sponsoring that event and its companion program, Mass Tort Med School, the same week.  As we come close to rounding out the first quarter of 2018, it is clear that several class action lawsuit trends from 2017 will continue to ripple through the court system this year. Class Action Lawsuit Stats Did you know three areas are responsible for a third of all class action lawsuits filed in the U.S.? The federal courts in California, Southern District (Miami) of Florida, and the Eastern District (Brooklyn) of New York keep lawyers and judges the busiest. In the initial nine months of 2017, a total 3,136 federal class action lawsuits were filed in those areas alone, according to an article published Dec. 9, 2017 by PorterWright.com. These statistics are apt to change because new Supreme Court decisions (Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California and BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrrell) rein in a court’s jurisdiction and ability to litigate matters when residents from outside the court’s state make claims. These new decisions mean a defendant [...]