This guide is intended to help judges to whom an MDL case has been transferred. Congress created the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation under 28 U.S.C. § 1407 and gave it the responsibility to transfer "civil actions involving one or more common questions of fact" from multiple districts to any single district for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings. The Panel centralizes cases in order to promote the convenient, just and efficient conduct of the actions. After the Panel transfers cases under § 1407, it exercises virtually no further control over them.

Superseded by Ten Steps to Better Case Management: A Guide for Multidistrict Litigation Transferee Judges, Second Edition (2014).