Legal News

Wyoming? Louisiana? California? Where Will the Toyota Suits Go?

By Ashby Jones

On Thursday, our own Dionne Searcey provided a bit of a preview of what to expect Thursday afternoon in San Diego, where a collection of the nation’s most visible plaintiffs’ lawyers had gathered. The reason? To persuade a panel of judges that the litigation should coalesce in the jurisdiction of their choosing.

So how’d it go? In Friday’s WSJ, Searcey called it the “legal world’s equivalent of speed-dating.” Some 24 plaintiffs’ lawyers crammed into a federal courtroom and each made “impassioned, two-minute pleas” before a panel of watchful judges. (From afar, it sounds like this could either be completely entertaining or incredibly tedious, C-SPAN for civil procedure junkies.) Click here for the National Law Journal story.

Judging from the coverage, the judges didn’t suffer from a lack of ideas. Writes Searcey:

One attorney argued for a Wyoming court setting, telling the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation how quickly cases move through the system there. Another sung the praises of a Louisiana judge who managed to keep cases moving along even as Hurricane Katrina barreled down. A third pitched for California, where Toyota’s U.S. headquarters is based, saying it was the “center of gravity” of the cases.

Sounds like California might have the inside track here, as, yes, many of the cases have already been filed there. It also seems to be where Toyota would like to see the cases handled. Alston & Bird’s Cari Dawson, a lawyer for Toyota, lobbied for the Central District of California, near its U.S. base in Torrance and closer to Japan than many other U.S. locales, which would be more convenient for its witnesses. “Japan is going to play a critical role,” she said.

In any event, the lawyers who argued on Thursday had to be persuasive — quickly. Each was given only two minutes to make his or her case.

Houston attorney Mark Lanier, known for the Vioxx case against Merck & Co., compared the bartering for time to “cigarettes in jail.”

“It’s like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange,” said Michael Louis Kelly, a Los Angeles attorney who is hoping the cases are centered in California.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).