In re Alodex Corporation Securities Litigation, 165.
| Decision Date | 18 July 1974 |
| Docket Number | No. 165.,165. |
| Citation | 380 F. Supp. 790 |
| Parties | In re ALODEX CORPORATION SECURITIES LITIGATION. |
| Court | Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation |
Before ALFRED P. MURRAH*, Chairman, and JOHN MINOR WISDOM, EDWARD WEINFELD, EDWIN A. ROBSON, WILLIAM H. BECKER*, JOSEPH S. LORD, III*, and STANLEY A. WEIGEL, Judges of the Panel.
This litigation consists of two actions in the Southern District of Iowa and one action in the District of Minnesota involving a real estate development project in Des Moines, Iowa. Plaintiffs exchanged their interests in certain Iowa property for stock in the Alodex Corporation. These actions arise out of that transaction and plaintiffs allege that defendants, Alodex, its accountants and two individuals, committed common law fraud and violations of the federal securities laws by misrepresenting and failing to disclose material facts concerning Alodex's ailing financial condition prior to the exchange.
Alodex and the two individual defendants move the Panel for an order transferring all actions to the Western District of Tennessee for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1407. Plaintiffs oppose transfer and, in the alternative, favor the Southern District of Iowa as the appropriate transferee forum. We find that these actions raise common questions of fact and that transfer of the Minnesota action to the Southern District of Iowa for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings with the actions already pending in that district will best serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses and promote the just and efficient conduct of the litigation.
Plaintiffs maintain that coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings are unnecessary because the factual issues in these actions are relatively simple. We disagree. These actions involve many common questions of fact concerning Alodex's financial condition and, as is usually the case in multidistrict securities litigation, these common factual issues are sufficiently complex to warrant transfer of all actions to a single district under Section 1407. Such a transfer insures that the possibility of duplicative discovery or inconsistent pretrial rulings will be avoided. And by entrusting the supervision of the pretrial proceedings in all actions to a single judge, substantial savings of judicial time and resources and the expeditious termination of the pretrial phase of the litigation will result.
Inasmuch as two of the...
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...Section 1407. Compare In re Scotch Whiskey, 299 F.Supp. 543, 544 (Jud.Pan.Mult.Lit.1969) with In re Alodex Corporation Securities Litigation, 380 F.Supp. 790, 790-91 (Jud.Pan.Mult.Lit. 1974). Though voluntary cooperation among the parties as a means of avoiding duplicative discovery is comm......
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Strategic Considerations For Multidistrict Litigation
...actions that arose from the same factual allegations and shared numerous “complex questions of fact”); In re Alodex Corp. Sec. Litig., 380 F. Supp. 790, 791 (J.P.M.L. 1974) (granting consolidation of three cases); In re Clark Oil & Ref. Corp. Antitrust Litig., 364 F. Supp. 458, 459 (J.P.M.L......