Betts v. Eli Lilly and Co.

• Decision Date: 05 June 2006
• Docket Number: Civil Action 06-0259-WS-B.
• Parties: Debra BETTS, Plaintiff, v. ELI LILLY AND COMPANY, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of Alabama

435 F.Supp.2d 1180

Debra BETTS, Plaintiff, v. ELI LILLY AND COMPANY, et al., Defendants.

Civil Action 06-0259-WS-B.

United States District Court, S.D. Alabama, Southern Division.

June 5, 2006.

David Matthews, Abraham, Watkins, Nichols, Sorrels, Matthews & Friend, Houston, TX, Joseph L. Tucker, K. Stephen Jackson, P.C., Birmingham, AL, for Plaintiff.

Alan Daniel Mathis, James C. Barton, Jr., Johnston Barton Proctor & Powell, Birmingham, AL, Rodney R. Cate, Hand Arendall, LLC, Mobile, AL, for Defendants.

ORDER

STEELE, District Judge.

This matter is before the Court on the motion of defendant Eli Lilly and Company ("Lilly") to stay all proceedings, (Doc. 4), and on the plaintiffs motion to remand. (Doc. 14). The parties have submitted briefs and other materials in support of their respective positions, (Docs.5, 15, 21, 22), and the motions are ripe for resolution. After carefully considering the foregoing, as well as other relevant materials in the file,¹ the Court concludes that the motion to stay is due to be denied and the motion to remand is due to be granted.

BACKGROUND

This suit is one of hundreds brought against Lilly as the manufacturer of Zyprexa. The plaintiff sued Lilly in state court on several causes of action and also sued her treating physician for medical negligence. (Complaint at 8). Both the plaintiff and the physician are citizens of Alabama, but Lilly removed on the basis of diversity of citizenship, claiming that the physician was fraudulently joined and so could be ignored for purposes of showing complete diversity.

Multidistrict litigation concerning Zyprexa has been established in the Eastern District of New York, and Lilly intends to seek transfer of this case to the MDL Court. Lilly's motion requests a stay of all proceedings in this Court pending transfer, including the plaintiffs motion to remand.

DISCUSSION

The parties agree that the Court has the authority to rule on a motion to remand whatever the likelihood that the MDL Panel will order transfer to the MDL Court. They differ as to whether the Court should exercise that authority or defer ruling by staying these proceedings pending transfer.

I. Motion to Stay.

Lilly argues that a stay of proceedings without reaching the motion to remand "will promote judicial economy, avoid inconsistent rulings by different district courts and avoid prejudice to both plaintiff and defendant." (Doc. 5 at 7). District courts have routinely isolated these as the key considerations in whether to grant a stay pending transfer to an MDL court, including when a motion to remand is pending. The rub comes in the courts' varied ways of assessing and valuing these considerations. It would serve no good purpose to engage in a thorough review of the many opinions in this arena, both because most of them lack detailed analysis and because this Court has already adopted a standard for gauging motions to defer ruling on a pending motion to remand: "`[a] court should first give preliminary scrutiny to the merits of the motion to remand' and ..., `if this preliminary assessment suggests that removal was improper, the court should promptly complete its consideration and remand the case to state court.'" Moton v. Bayer Corp., 2005 WL 1653731 at *2 (S.D.Ala.2005)(quoting Meyers v. Bayer AG, 143 F.Supp.2d 1044, 1049 (E.D.Wis. 2001)).²

The Court has adopted this portion of Meyers because it appears better calculated to vindicate the interests of judicial economy, consistency of result, and minimization of prejudice to the parties than a reflexive rule that automatically defers decision to an MDL court whenever it can be predicted that an issue at least superficially similar may arise in other transferred cases. Because the question is a recurring one, the Court pauses to amplify the reasons it gave in Moton for drawing this conclusion.

The economy of the transferor court presumably is always enhanced by deferring ruling on a motion to remand, since it takes no effort to do nothing. However, an accurate assessment of judicial economy requires consideration of the time and effort of all courts involved; a deferral that saves one court an hour's work but costs other courts several more is scarcely a conservator of judicial resources. The Meyers approach respects this economic fact. Because the result in a motion to remand captured by the first Meyers step is apparent on initial review, the transferor court's investment in resolving the motion is minimal or at least minor. All things being equal, the investment of the transferee court in deciding the same motion would be roughly equivalent, resulting in a neutral effect on judicial economy — scarcely an argument in favor of deferral. But in the MDL context there is always a third court involved: the MDL Panel. To defer ruling on a plainly meritorious motion to remand forces that body of seven judges (who have their own dockets in addition to the Panel's) to needlessly review and hear argument on requests for transfer, objections thereto, and post-transfer matters. Because the first step of Meyers assumes it is clear that the case must be remanded, every minute of time spent by the Panel on the case is wasted, guaranteeing that deferral results in a net loss of judicial economy.³

The only means possible to overcome the negative judicial economy created when a transferor court defers ruling on a clear motion to remand is to invoke the economies of scale. The idea is that, although it would be inefficient to transfer to an MDL court a single case with a motion to remand, it is efficient to transfer twenty such cases, because the MDL court can dispose of twenty motions to remand more efficiently than twenty courts can dispose of one motion to remand each.

The anticipated economies of scale, however, disappear when the motions to remand are straightforward and easily resolved. This follows from two related phenomena: first, in a simple case each transferor court will invest little time in resolving the issue (which provides a limited pool of potential savings from deferral); and second, the transferee court must of course review each case individually before reaching its conclusion (which drains the potential savings from deferral).⁴ The Panel's investment in transferring twenty cases consumes whatever marginal savings remain. Judicial economy thus remains unimproved by even a large-scale transfer of cases with identical, plainly meritorious motions to remand.⁵

Implementing the first step of the Meyers approach imposes costs on the transferor court that should be considered in evaluating the net effect of the approach on judicial economy. The preliminary assessment required by Meyers naturally consumes judicial time. When the assessment confirms that the motion is due to be granted, the time spent performing it is recaptured without loss in the disposition of the motion. When, however, the assessment reflects that deferral is appropriate, the transferor court cannot directly recapture the time expended in making the assessment. Performing the assessment thus results in an arguable loss of judicial economy in such cases.

This incidental cost of following Meyers, however, does not warrant rejecting it. First, the cost does not reflect a true loss of judicial economy, any more than does a court's sua sponte examination of its subject matter jurisdiction which confirms the existence of such jurisdiction. In both situations, it is highly economical to scrutinize jurisdictional matters at an early stage, regardless of whether in a particular case that scrutiny discloses the presence or absence of jurisdiction.⁶ Second, the amount of time required to perform a preliminary assessment is almost always measured in minutes and so cannot have a significant effect on overall judicial economy. Most importantly, the time so spent is dwarfed by the time that MDL courts and the Panel would waste were Meyers rejected so that transferor courts automatically deferred ruling on even obvious motions to remand.

With judicial economy eliminated as a justification for rejecting the Meyers approach, only the risk of inconsistent results and prejudice to the parties remain for consideration. Because the first step of Meyers contemplates that different judges will review similar motions to remand, it is of course possible they will reach different results. To the extent the motions are similar but not identical in terms of the facts presented, the law governing, and the arguments asserted, such disparity in result is neither surprising nor undesirable and would probably be mimicked by the transferee judge. But because Meyers contemplates that only obvious motions to remand will be decided by the transferor court, the possibility of inconsistent results on truly indistinguishable facts, law and argument is largely theoretical.⁷ As for prejudice, no party has a right to remain in federal court when subject matter jurisdiction is plainly lacking, and a defendant caught by Meyers is thus not prejudiced in any meaningful sense by an early rather than late remand to state court.

Lilly proffers a fistful of ineffectual arguments why the Court should not reach the plaintiffs motion to remand. First, Lilly argues that "[t]he issue of fraudulent joinder ... is much more complex than a simple amount in controversy inquiry" as in Meyers, such that a preliminary assessment is inadequate to determine whether removal was improper. (Doc. 21 at 5). It is doubtlessly true that some fraudulent joinder issues are sufficiently intricate that a preliminary assessment of them would not enable a court to reach a confident conclusion.⁸ This Court, however, is not considering a hypothetical or even typical case, but rather the specific case pleaded by the plaintiff now before the Court. It is simply irrelevant whether different fraudulent joinder issues might be immune to resolution by preliminary assessment; the only question is whether this fraudulent...