In the right case, we are big fans of the “Lone Pine” order as a tool of case management.  Named for Lore v. Lone Pine Corp., No. L-33606-85, 1986 WL 637507 (N.J.Super. Ct. Law Div. Nov. 18, 1986), Lone Pine orders are designed to handle the complex issues and potential burdens on the parties and the court in mass tort and toxic tort litigation. Acuna v. Brown & Root Inc., 200 F.3d 335, 340 (5th Cir.2000).   The term refers to case management orders that require the plaintiffs to make a showing regarding causation, injury, and/or damages to demonstrate, typically at an early stage, some minimal level of evidentiary support for the key components of their claims which will be in dispute.

While the 1986 New Jersey Superior Court case involved traditional toxic tort claims, the device has gotten good use in drug cases as well.  E.g., In re Vioxx Products Liab. Litig., 2010 WL 2802352 (5th Cir. July 16, 2010). After a tentative settlement was reached in the Vioxx litigation, the MDL court entered several pre-trial orders with respect to the claims of those plaintiffs who could not or chose not to participate in the Master Settlement Agreement.  The order required non-settling plaintiffs to notify their health-care providers that they must preserve evidence pertaining to the plaintiffs’ use of Vioxx. Plaintiffs were also required to produce pharmacy records and medical authorizations, answers to interrogatories, and a Rule 26(a)(2) report from a medical expert attesting that the plaintiff sustained an injury caused by Vioxx and that the injury occurred within a specified time period. Failure to comply eventually resulted in dismissal of several of the plaintiffs’ claims with prejudice.

And the federal judge overseeing the MDL for Celebrex and Bextra found that a “Lone Pine” order was appropriate for managing the claims of the remaining, non-settling plaintiffs. In re: Bextra and Celebrex Marketing Sales Practices and Product Liability Litigation, No. M:05-cv-01699 (N.D. Cal.) (Pretrial Order No. 29, Aug. 1, 2008).

In the drug context, a Lone Pine order might require plaintiffs to submit a case-specific expert report on the issue of medical causation; or to turn over medical records that documented an injury, prescription records that showed medication history and dosages prescribed, and/or proof of dosage in relation to the injury. The benefit to the court of requiring plaintiffs to supply this information is that the parties will not have to engage in protracted discovery in hundreds or thousands of cases just to see whether each one has some threshold evidence of medical causation. The production of such basic and threshold evidence is simply a part of a good-faith investigation that should precede the filing of a lawsuit.

Requiring plaintiffs to identify basic information about injuries and causation is not unreasonable given the costs that mass tort claims have on the legal system, and on defendants in particular. Lone Pine orders allow courts to weed out the frivolous suits where there is insufficient exposure, or no sufficient scientific connection between injury and exposure. Accordingly, Lone Pine orders can be effective when entered early in the game. Early disposal of frivolous claims allows the parties to focus their attention on the serious cases. Ideally, the order will actually phase discovery, and motions practice as well, with the Lone Pine issues pushed up front.

But the device also has a role later in mature mass torts when, as seen above, a chunk of the litigation has settled and there still remain numerous claims of questionable strength.

In the MDL involving the the diabetes medication Avandia, In re Avandia Marketing, Sales Practices, and Products Liab. Litig., MDL No. 1871 (Pretrial Order No. 121)(E.D. Pa. Nov. 15, 2010), the federal court has recently adopted a Lone Pine order.  The court found that many of the remaining claims lacked sufficient support or detail even after submission of the Plaintiff Fact Sheets.  Thus, additional detail about the plaintiffs’ claims was necessary in furtherance of settlement agreements, for the selection of cases for bellwether trials, and for the timely remand of cases to the transferor courts for resolution.

The court’s overriding concern was having sufficient information to objectively identify which of the many thousands of remaining plaintiffs have injuries that could credibly be linked to the drug usage.  The order calls for information that the court said the plaintiffs should have had before filing their claims.

Specifically, plaintiffs have to have a licensed physician identify the plaintiff’s Avandia usage, the alleged injury, the time lag between drug usage and injury, and a certification that the drug usage caused the injury.

Failure of a plaintiff to submit these required expert certification (and supporting documents) in a timely fashion may result in the dismissal of that plaintiff’s claims with prejudice.

A defendant in such litigation should not bear the burden of winnowing cases that never should have been filed, nor should the court be saddled with consideration of claims that would not have survived reasonable pre-complaint investigation.