Yearly Archives: 2016

Racketeers, Mobsters, & Plaintiffs’ Mass-Action Attorneys

Oct 12, 2016 Brooke D. Coleman1 comment

A racketeer, a mobster, and a plaintiffs’ mass-action attorney walk into a bar. What might be a decent setup for a joke is actually dead serious. Like members of organized crime, plaintiffs’ mass-action attorneys are being sued under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statutes. Briana Rosenbaum’s The RICO Trend in Class Action Warfare carefully considers existing remedies for frivolous litigation and critiques what she sees as the inefficacy of “the RICO reprisal.”

Rosenbaum readily admits that some mass-action attorneys include frivolous claims among meritorious ones in an attempt to obtain a larger settlement, otherwise known as “specious claiming.” But Rosenbaum argues that remedies for abusive litigation already exist. There are tort remedies such as malicious prosecution and abuse of process, and procedural remedies such as Fed. R. Civ. P. 11 and 28 U.S.C. § 1927. Rosenbaum posits that this existing remedial structure for vexatious litigants, while imperfect, was at least created with important countervailing policy considerations in mind, such as access to justice and administrative efficiency.

None of these countervailing policy considerations went into crafting RICO as a remedy for abusive litigation. Rosenbaum uses CSX Transportation, Inc. v. Gilkison as a case study to show just how poorly RICO works. CSX is the only known case to go to trial and result in a verdict against the plaintiffs’ attorneys. It arises from asbestos litigation, where it is undisputed that the plaintiffs’ law firm relied on a questionable expert who used controversial diagnostic methods. There is much to say about this case, but for purposes of understanding Rosenbaum’s article, one need know only the bottom line. The asbestos litigation defendants filed a RICO claim against the plaintiffs’ attorneys and demonstrated that eleven out of the 5,300 claims filed, or 0.2%, were baseless. On that evidence, CSX won its RICO claim at a jury trial, leading the parties to settle the case for $7.3 million.

To understand how this happened requires a basic understanding of RICO. First, to win a civil RICO claim, an injured party must prove that the defendant engaged in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering. The statute provides an exhaustive list of “racketeering activity,” but the most common “predicate offense” in these recent cases against plaintiffs’ attorneys is mail or wire fraud. This criminal act must be shown before there is any civil liability under RICO. In CSX, the court found that every time the plaintiffs’ law firm filed a paper with the court—such as a complaint—or sent correspondence to opposing counsel—such as a letter with a courtesy copy of a mediation request—it committed mail fraud. The court determined that it was not just the eleven fraudulent claims that established a pattern under RICO, but was instead the mass suit itself because the attorneys allegedly used the threat of a mass action that included concealed fraudulent claims to leverage a higher settlement.

CSX is a shocking case that is part of a larger trend of mass-action defendants pursuing plaintiffs’ attorneys through RICO. The CSX numbers and facts are staggering, but perhaps appropriate if the punishment fits the crime. Rosenbaum argues that it does not. Calling on existing critiques of RICO in other contexts, Rosenbaum points out that necessary legal practice activities, such as making phone calls and filing court documents, become potentially criminal. Moreover, successful RICO claims result in treble damages, which inflate what a party would normally recover in a garden-variety malicious prosecution claim. If we are concerned with ensuring that courts remain open to aggregate litigation claims, Rosenbaum argues, RICO is much too powerful a weapon.

Rosenbaum also presents more nuanced arguments about why RICO is a poor regulation tool against frivolous claims. For example, she argues that RICO unnecessarily usurps state-law methods of regulating litigation. After all, RICO’s pleading standards and burden of proof are lighter than a state-law malicious prosecution claim, and the damages are certainly larger. This makes bringing a RICO claim, rather than a state tort claim, something of a no-brainer for defendants seeking a remedy against vexatious aggregate-litigation plaintiffs’ attorneys, which is exactly the problem that Rosenbaum wants to highlight. Perhaps RICO makes it too easy, producing a negative impact on aggregate litigation overall.

Finally, Rosenbaum points out that RICO is at once under- and over-inclusive. It is over-inclusive because it targets the entire mass action as a violation, not just the handful of baseless claims that may be part of that litigation. It is under-inclusive because it addresses only a sliver of the structural challenges aggregate litigation presents. Again, Rosenbaum does not dispute that over-aggregation is a problem, but relying on defendants’ attorneys to regulate plaintiffs’ attorney conduct seems equally problematic.

If RICO is to remain a part of the litigation game, however, Rosenbaum argues it should be reformed. When pure litigation conduct is challenged, courts could require a showing of malicious intent. This would bring RICO in line with existing common law remedies such as malicious prosecution. It also would re-balance access-to-justice concerns. Our system cannot be completely free from frivolous litigation. Indeed, we must tolerate some frivolousness in order to make room for meritorious claims. Moreover, requiring a showing of intent in the RICO context would not leave defendants without any recourse. They could still use existing remedies for pure litigation conduct, and RICO could be reserved for truly egregious litigation schemes.

Perhaps the title of this essay—Racketeers, Mobsters, and Plaintiffs’ Mass-Action Attorneys—made sense to you as a story about three equivalent evildoers. Or perhaps, like me, this group of individuals struck you as incongruent. Regardless of which explanation most speaks to you, you will benefit from reading Rosenbaum’s take on this emerging development in the civil litigation game.

Common Law in the Age of Arbitration

Sep 23, 2016 Allan Erbsen1 comment

Judge-made law is dynamic. Rules adapt to innovations in technology, trends in human behavior and markets, and nascent theories that unsettle previously entrenched approaches to a problem. Even when a rule’s basic elements are stable, the accretion of new decisions can lead to subtly different formulations, caveats, and corollaries. Observers might therefore assume that doctrine in any given field will evolve for as long as affected actors are creative and litigious.

But even litigious actors cannot instigate changes to judge-made rules if litigation cannot lead to new judicial opinions. Myriam Gilles proposes a thought experiment to illustrate this possibility in her new article. Suppose that all cases in field X were suddenly shunted to arbitration, such that courts had no further opportunity to write opinions expounding on the law of X. Further suppose that choice-of-law provisions required arbitrators to apply judge-made rules governing X and that arbitrators would not write detailed opinions explaining their decisions (or that their opinions would be inaccessible to nonparties). In this hypothetical regime, the common law of X would stagnate. Doctrine would remain on the books as a source of guidance for arbitrators addressing the idiosyncrasies of individual cases. But those idiosyncrasies would no longer be catalysts for refining the publicly articulated rules that arbitrators apply. Judge-made law would shape outcomes, yet outcomes would not reshape the law.

Gilles’ article offers the game of musical chairs as a metaphor for the doctrinal stagnation that can arise when arbitration supplants public adjudication. When the music stops, players are locked into the arrangement of chairs at that moment. Each player’s position relative to the fixed chairs influences who wins and who loses. Likewise, when arbitrators who do not publish opinions begin deciding all cases in a particular field, litigants are stuck with the formulation of judge-made rules at the time judges were displaced. Given that doctrine is constantly evolving, any muting of public adjudication (the music in this metaphor) will occur after one innovation and before the next innovation. A normative assessment of whether the music has stopped at an appropriate time therefore requires considering both the content of current rules and the lost opportunity for those rules to develop. More generally, if one thinks that the common law process improves doctrine over the long term, then stopping the music at any point in a rule’s evolution may require a compelling justification.

Gilles develops her argument in three steps. First, she discusses several historical trends that coalesced into a movement away from public adjudication. For example, Gilles argues that the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations invoked the prospect of frivolous suits and burdensome litigation costs to justify making adjudication of a claim’s merits less likely and less effective. Gilles contends that even though legislative initiatives largely fizzled, judicial appointees from these eras successfully implemented what she describes as an “anti-lawsuit agenda.” At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court expanded the scope of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) to encompass federal statutory claims. This innovation empowered potential defendants to draft contractual arbitration provisions that circumvented courts in an increasingly wide range of cases, including putative class actions.

Second, Gilles considers the potential consequences of privatizing adjudication in three fields: antitrust, consumer protection, and employment discrimination. Each field features an active common law process in which judge-made doctrines elaborate on sparse statutory language. Each also implicates statutory claims that would arguably be immune from arbitration if the Court retreated from its expansive interpretation of the FAA.

Gilles uses these three fields as grist for a fascinating counterfactual question: How would the substantive law have developed differently if arbitration had been more widely available in the past? Her review of recent antitrust, consumer protection, and employment discrimination cases concludes that many share two characteristics: The parties had a contract, and the court’s opinion meaningfully altered or refined doctrine. These observations suggest that if the contracts had included an enforceable arbitration clause, then many important opinions never would have been written. Modern doctrine in this counterfactual world would include elements that were destined to change, but that persisted because of the shift from public to private adjudication.

The case studies provide a concrete illustration of how arbitration can “freeze” doctrine. If the Supreme Court interprets the FAA to allow arbitration of a particular claim, and if actors draft arbitration clauses that encompass such claims, then courts will lose opportunities to modify judge-made rules. The rules will persist, but they will not evolve. Of course, evolution in an adversarial system is not always for the best; any given change will have supporters and opponents. The prospect of doctrinal stagnation is nevertheless interesting even if its normative implications are not always apparent.

Third, Gilles notes that arbitrators can mitigate stagnation by publishing reasoned opinions. But she contends that arbitrators have little incentive to replace courts as public expositors of law because arbitration thrives on confidentiality and streamlined procedures. Courts could create such an incentive by refusing to confirm arbitral awards without a reasoned opinion, but that is not a path that FAA jurisprudence has taken.

Gilles’s analysis has several interesting implications. As she acknowledges, her thesis builds on earlier work by Owen Fiss exploring the risk that settlements pose for the explication of public law. Fiss was concerned about cases dropping out of the judicial system before a final decision, while Gilles is concerned about cases never reaching the judicial system. Both issues require assessing the value of judicial opinion-writing and weighing that value against the potential benefits of using private agreements to streamline dispute resolution.

Gilles’s argument also suggests that certain kinds of claims may be more susceptible to doctrinal stagnation than others. For example, suppose that claim Y arises exclusively in a context where the parties have a contract and one party has leverage to compel arbitration. In contrast, claim Z arises roughly equally in cases with and without contracts. Applying the FAA to claim Y would remove from the judicial system all or most cases raising Y, while applying the FAA to claim Z would leave courts free to adjudicate the subset of Z claims that do not involve a contract. Enforcement of arbitration clauses might therefore be more troubling in the Y context than in the Z context if the stagnation of doctrine is a legitimate factor to consider when allocating claims between public and private fora.

Another intriguing question arises from Gilles’ implicit assumption that reducing the number of judicial opinions in a field reduces innovation. A decline in the number of cases that courts adjudicate does not necessarily mean that rules will stagnate. What matters is whether the remaining cases provide a sufficient foundation for innovation. There is no obvious way to determine how deep the pool of justiciable cases needs to be, which complicates any effort to determine if arbitration has excessively drained it. Scholars might therefore consider how to identify the minimum number and variety of cases that courts must adjudicate in a given field to ensure that rules remain sufficiently dynamic.

Finally, lawyers will presumably engage in strategic behavior as they encounter the risks that Gilles identifies. The article focuses on scenarios where judges can no longer rule on an entire category of claims, such that the law becomes completely frozen. These scenarios illustrate the article’s theoretical point, but in practice may be outliers. Contracts are not ubiquitous in many areas of law, some contracts will not contain an enforceable arbitration clause, judicial review of arbitral awards may provide an opportunity to expound on rules applied by arbitrators, and government agencies may be able to file enforcement actions even if individual plaintiffs lack a right to sue.

The possibility that public adjudication will persist alongside arbitration means that the relevant ice metaphor is not that doctrines will entirely freeze. Instead, the pace of evolution might become relatively glacial. A lingering window for judicial decisionmaking will create opportunities for strategic behavior designed to induce doctrinal change. For example, government lawyers may bring enforcement actions that they hope will result in new judicial precedent for arbitrators to follow, public interest lawyers may look for test cases in which arbitration is not an obstacle to adjudication, and defense lawyers may seek opportunities to reshape rules with which their clients disagree. Stagnation of legal doctrine is therefore not an inevitable consequence of sending more cases to arbitration, but rather a risk that well-informed actors may attempt to avoid or exploit. The strategies that actors might employ would be an interesting topic for further study.

Gilles has creatively explored a difficult problem with a thought-provoking counterfactual experiment. Her analysis is an illuminating addition to the literature about the relative merits of public and private adjudication.

The Vanishing Poor

Sep 9, 2016 Elizabeth G. ThornburgAdd a Comment

It’s certainly not news that, in recent years, the Supreme Court majority has been unenthusiastic about class actions. Reinterpretations of procedural rules and standing requirements make class certification more difficult and efforts at certification more expensive. Ever-broadening interpretations of the Federal Arbitration Act also move claims out of courts and prohibit aggregation of claims in arbitration. Procedure scholars have lamented these decisions for years, as the gradual accretion of unfortunate decisions continues.

I love this essay by Myriam Gilles because it changes my focus from processes to people and shines a light on the groups whose claims disappear in the absence of class action litigation. Conceptually, I’ve talked about “negative value claims” or perhaps “consumers” and “employees,” but unconsciously saw the issue through the lens of my own class-member settlements in cases involving unauthorized foreign transaction fees and excessive e-Book prices. I failed to think through the many ways in which those SCOTUS decisions have a systemic and devastating impact on the poor and powerless.

Class Warfare explores three interconnected implications of the decline of class actions and their impact on low-income groups. First, it explores the ways in which the poor are particularly vulnerable to the kinds of unlawful practices that require aggregation for a remedy: low-value consumer claims and group-based workplace harms. Lack of access to conventional credit markets makes low-income consumers targets of financial abuses such as predatory lending, abusive mortgage terms, and subprime car loans. Payday loans are a particular scourge. Gilles argues that although there have been some efforts at regulatory enforcement, private class litigation has been an important tool in reigning in improper practices. She points to the class action against ACE Cash Express that settled in 2003, resulting in loan forgiveness, changed practices, and modest cash payments.

As for employees, Gilles posits that low-wage workers are more often victimized by employers. Explanations vary: they have less bargaining power, they lack information about alternatives, and they are rationally risk-averse (having no economic cushion in the event of dismissal). The result is lower pay, fewer benefits, less job security, more discrimination, and more violations of wage and hour laws. Again, there are some legislative and regulatory measures available, but for groups without political clout, aggregate litigation is a more effective alternative. Gilles does include a footnote identifying one fascinating example of nonjudicial self-help, however: an immigrants’ rights group has developed a smartphone app for day laborers. According to an article describing the app, “Workers will be able to rate employers (think Yelp or Uber), log their hours and wages, take pictures of job sites and help identify, down to the color and make of a car, employers with a history of withholding wages. They will also be able to send instant alerts to other workers.”

Gilles’ article’s second point focuses on the potential impact of successful class litigation, where the small monetary claims are not individually feasible but aggregation provides a powerful tool for group relief. The most important benefit comes not from individual class-member payouts (“small value class actions [are] quite poor vehicles for efficiently distributing tiny per-person damages”) but from broad-based injunctive relief and from the deterrent effect of forcing the defendant to internalize the social cost of its actions. Gilles suggests that both specific and general deterrence are at work. Without such deterrence, exploitative practices will repeatedly impact the same people. “[W]hen members of low-income groups suffer group-based harm, there is a high likelihood that precisely the same individuals will suffer precisely the same harm in the future given the inability to escape poverty. And further, it is likely that their children (and possibly grandchildren) will also suffer the same harms in the more distant future.”

Third, and equally worrying, Class Warfare identifies potential long-term effects of losing class actions that invoke the rights of low-income litigants. Will some types of litigation disappear from the docket (because litigating individual claims is not economically viable)? If so, will courts lose the ability to develop the law in those areas? And when both people and legal issues have almost vanished from the docket, will judges – themselves likely to come from high-income backgrounds – lose the ability to understand the lived reality of low-income people? To be sure, this cultural blindness already exists. Gilles cites United States v. Kras (1973) as an example of some Justices’ making false assumptions about the ability of a bankruptcy debtor to make payments and find a job. Judges, as humans, have the same kinds of implicit biases as the rest of us, and when there is no judicial exposure to poverty to enrich the lens through which judges view facts, inexperience can morph into fact-finding errors. This is all the more problematic at a time when judges are increasingly called upon to decide whether inferences from circumstantial evidence are plausible and whether discovery expenses are proportional given the “importance of the issues at stake in the action” and “the parties’ resources.”

One could quibble with some of Gilles’ points. Some of the abuses of the poor are legal, there are some agencies charged with providing relief, and some cases will find their way to court. Nonetheless, Class Warfare correctly describes the overall impact of court-rationing on low-income groups. Once again, the “Haves” come out ahead.

For some, the popular culture class action story is about greedy plaintiffs’ lawyers getting rich raising frivolous issues like the lack of vitamins in Vitamin Water and the presence of pesticides in “all-natural” tea. Gilles’ article is an important reminder that more is at stake. Procedural change has predictably disproportionate impact on those without the financial and legal resources to fully utilize the court system. It’s not just generic “consumers” and “employees” who suffer when class actions become unavailable; the burden will fall most heavily on those who have the least.

One last note: Class Warfare is part of a symposium issue of the Emory Law Journal (vol. 65, issue 6). Procedure scholars interested in Gilles’ essay will also find other articles in the issue fascinating.

How and Why Representation Matters

Aug 17, 2016 Jessica SteinbergAdd a Comment

The sociologist Rebecca Sandefur estimates that a staggering one in three members of the population experiences a civil justice problem every year. Recent reports consistently pronounce that a glut of newly minted lawyers is crowding an oversaturated market. Yet low- and moderate-income Americans are far more likely than not to attempt to protect important rights to housing, custody, financial security, and physical safety without the benefit of attorney assistance. A conservative estimate puts the number of unrepresented parties in the civil justice system at twelve or thirteen million. Gillian Hadfield and James Heine suggest that the inaccessibility of legal services leads nearly forty percent of Americans to “lump” their civil justice problems, or do nothing to solve them.

In light of these distressing statistics, two hot topics in access to justice have emerged in recent years. In one camp are those who promote the need for a right to counsel—a “civil Gideon”—in a broader range of civil cases. In a second camp are those who propose innovative models for the distribution of scarce attorney resources, including the delivery of “unbundled,” or brief, services in lieu of full representation, as well as the licensing of non-attorneys to handle routine legal matters.

One complication in evaluating the various proposals to increase access to legal services is that we lack the robust empirical data necessary to determine whether, and in what forms, attorney representation makes a difference. And that is where Colleen Shanahan, Anna Carpenter, and Alyx Mark’s outstanding article comes in.

While several previous studies have examined the binary question of whether the provision of attorney assistance impacts outcomes, these authors take the analysis further. Reviewing 1800 unemployment insurance cases in an independent and professionalized administrative court, they examine not just whether representation correlates to improved case outcomes, but also the significantly more complex question of how and why representation matters.

Relying on their significant data set, the authors find that representation is positively correlated with favorable outcomes. This finding is intuitively sound and corroborates much of the extant literature on attorney impact but, on its own, is more confirmatory than revelatory. The authors go further, however, exploring various aspects of attorney and lay representation that might account for improved outcomes. They unpack the case and litigant characteristics associated with a range of outcomes and suggest that two primary factors may influence whether representation makes a difference: balance of power between the parties and strategic expertise.

In the authors’ data set, the balance of power influenced how much benefit the parties derived from representation. When the parties lacked other types of power, representation produced the most significant effect on outcomes. For instance, represented claimants were awarded unemployment benefits at three times the rate of their unrepresented counterparts. By contrast, represented employers did not have a statistically significant advantage over unrepresented employers. The authors attribute this difference in representation outcomes to the social and economic power that claimants lack and employers enjoy. Their finding lends empirical heft to Marc Galanter’s theory that the “haves” often outperform the “have nots” in the legal system—even in the absence of representation—because of the knowledge and social power they bring to their legal matters.

The authors also develop the concept of “strategic expertise” and contend that it plays a role in effective representation. They define this as a representative’s ability to “connect formal training with situational understanding.” And they show that it is not simply representation that matters, but also how that representation is deployed. For example, attorneys are more likely to utilize procedural entitlements, such as witness disclosure and document production. And while we might expect this to correlate to more favorable outcomes, it does not always do so. Indeed, in a fascinating illustration of their theory of strategic expertise, the authors show that attorneys who presented evidence on behalf of a claimant fared less favorably than those who withheld documents and instructed their clients to remain silent. While it is common in a criminal trial for a defendant to refrain from testifying, the decision to withhold party evidence in a civil case—especially one held in an informal administrative tribunal—is not a matter of conventional wisdom. This is where strategic expertise comes into play. The attorney must take into account the claimant’s burden of proof, the signaling effect that introduction of evidence may have on the judge’s perception of relative case strengths, and the potential for backlash against zealous representation in a tribunal where the vast majority of claimants are unrepresented.

In tackling the question of why and how representation matters, the authors also uncover important data regarding the impact of assistance that falls short of full representation. In a surprising finding, they note that a substantial percentage of “represented” employers did not have representation at the administrative hearing itself. Presumably, this type of representation resembles the model of “unbundled” assistance, in which the representative offers advice or document preparation, but not the full panoply of attorney services. The authors demonstrate that such behind-the-scenes representation may not translate to favorable case outcomes. According to their data, employers nearly tripled their prospects of winning when they had full representation at the hearing. This suggests that “unbundled” services, a hotly debated proposal for improving access to justice, may deprive parties of the strategic expertise that traditional attorney assistance brings to the table.

Shanahan, Carpenter, and Mark’s data offer considerable opportunity for future analysis, and I most look forward to a fine-grained evaluation of the comparative advantages of attorney and non-attorney assistance. This study analyzed “representation” wholesale, although thirty-eight percent of represented employers were assisted by professional lay advocates, not lawyers. The authors promise to address the distinction in their next article, using a much larger data set and qualitative interviews. This new data may provide important clues as to when and how non-lawyers may be able to bring strategic expertise to the table and impact the balance of power. And it comes as Washington State pilots a controversial program to certify Limited License Legal Technicians to represent clients in certain circumstances.

Shanahan, Carpenter, and Mark’s article offers a window into the potential of evidence-based research on questions of access to justice. We are in an age of innovation with respect to the delivery of legal services to low- and moderate-income individuals. Full attorney representation is a rare luxury that few can access. To design effective and alternative models of service delivery, it is essential to understand the particular aspects of representation that are most critical to a case. This article effectively combines Shanahan and Carpenter’s firsthand experience in litigating unemployment insurance cases as clinical professors with Mark’s social science expertise. The authors should be applauded for advancing our understanding of representation in context and for producing excellent access-to-justice scholarship that is both theory-proving and theory-generating.

Classing up the Agency

Jul 25, 2016 Sergio J. CamposAdd a Comment

In previous jots, I have highlighted articles that addressed not the why of procedure but the how. Although other forms of legal scholarship are valuable, I have always had a soft spot for legal scholarship that provides guidance for judges and policymakers on how best to set up legal procedures.

It should therefore come as no surprise that a recent piece that I like lots is not a journal article, but a government report that addresses the problem of mass litigation in administrative agencies. The report discusses, and recommends, the use of class action and similar procedures in administrative adjudicatory proceedings that involve numerous claimants against one or a few defendants. Unlike a law journal article—which, like a message in a bottle, may float out to sea never reaching its intended audience—this report not only directly addresses policymakers, but they actually read and implemented it.

The report is the result of a law journal article serendipitously reaching its intended recipient. It is the brainchild of Adam Zimmerman and Michael Sant’Ambrogio, who published an article in 2012 proposing the use of class action and similar aggregate litigation procedures in administrative adjudication (an article that I liked lots in a different forum). The article caught the attention of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), an independent federal agency focusing on improving administrative processes. ACUS then asked Zimmerman and Sant’Ambrogio to study the use of aggregate procedures in federal agencies and make recommendations. This report is the result of that study.

Zimmerman and Sant’Ambrogio’s law review article is akin to a doctor making an initial diagnosis. Here, that initial diagnosis concerned the problem of numerous claims against a common defendant. Even with the more streamlined procedures of administrative adjudication, it can be difficult for claimants to finance and litigate given the costs. In contrast, a defending party can spread its costs on common issues across all of the numerous claims, thereby reducing the cost for each claim. As a result, the defendant invests more in common issues because it has more at stake. The report offers several vivid examples – providers and hospital claims against Medicare, EEOC claims of discrimination on behalf of thousands of employees against a single employer, or vaccine defect claims against large pharmaceutical companies made in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

But the report goes beyond diagnosis, looking more like an exhaustive physical examination and treatment plan. One important contribution is cataloguing class action and similar aggregate procedures already in use by some agencies, although the vast majority of agencies historically have not utilized or developed such procedures. In general, class actions and similar aggregate procedures alleviate the problem of “asymmetrical stakes” between the numerous plaintiffs and the defendant, by incentivizing third parties such as the class attorney to make proper investments in common issues and by streamlining procedures through the use of statistical sampling and bellwether trials. The different procedures developed at these few agencies are a testament to the ingenuity of administrators, who saw the failure to address aggregate procedures in the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) as an invitation to innovate procedures on their own.

For example, in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which displaced the existing tort system with an administrative procedure for defect claims, vaccine claims filed against manufacturers were initially adjudicated one claim at a time. This obviously overwhelmed the small office of eight adjudicators charged with adjudicating the claims. But this “small office” ingenuously used its “inherent authority to use ‘specialized knowledge’ to resolve common scientific issues in a consistent and informed way,” thereby streamlining individual claim adjudication. It also used “omnibus proceedings” which “loosely resemble multidistrict litigation, bellwether hearing procedures, and creative case-management techniques” to ensure adequate public input and investment on the resolution of these common issues. The Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals not only utilized similar aggregate procedures, but instituted a “statistical sampling initiative” to deal with overpayments to avoid deciding such issues on a claim-by-claim basis.

In June 2016, the Administrative Conference, relying on the report, adopted a series of recommendations that are careful and sensible, reading like a greatest hits of best practices in dealing with high volume claims with common issues against a single party. They include defining when aggregate procedures should be used and what principles should apply in limiting these procedures. The recommendations urge agencies to “encourage[e] adjudicators and parties” to help identify common issues in cases that would benefit from aggregate procedures. They also ask agencies to ensure that all procedures are proposed and adopted publicly and transparently. These recommendations have since been published in the Federal Register, and have already been influential. For example, the Department of Education recently proposed class action rules for student loan forgiveness claims against predatory and insolvent for-profit colleges.

The legal academy is often chastised for not addressing the problems of policymakers. I do not think that legal scholarship should solely address current problems, and JOTWELL does an extraordinary job of highlighting successful scholarship achieving a variety of objectives. But the criticism itself is also overstated, because it ignores the good work done by scholars who assist with legal reform. This report is a great example of legal scholars and policymakers working together to solve important problems.