The dangers of mass tort litigation.

Eight actions you can take to protect your association.

Initially, we had no idea what was happening to us or how to light it. It started as a trickle. One day the office would receive a lawsuit or two. Then a process server might show up with three or four lawsuits at a time. Then we started to receive boxes full of lawsuits, sometimes 26 in a box and two or three boxes full of them. Imagine acknowledging receipt of 532 lawsuits with your signature.

In late 1994, the North American Spine Society (NASS), Rosemont, Illinois, had received a seemingly innocuous subpoena for records about a medical device used in spine surgery - something called a pedicle screw. There had been some unfavorable news stories about the screw and some controversy about its use in fusion surgery. After we submitted documents in February 1995, NASS and several other medical associations were clobbered with more than 532 lawsuits, each alleging that because we offered certain companies exhibit space at our annual meeting and allowed the discussion of the screw at our conferences, we had unlawfully conspired with manufacturers in marketing their "unreasonably dangerous" product. NASS found itself in the middle of a mass tort it is still fighting today, two years later. If it can happen to us, it can happen to you - especially if your members deal with new technologies, pharmaceuticals, food, chemicals, or other large-volume consumer products.

As the staff leader of an association, your job is to drive the association around obstacles, through storms, and over hills to accomplish your mission. But you probably are not prepared for a torrent of litigation. Unfortunately, sometimes it is impossible to avoid such bumps in the road as programmatic tort, which Jerald A. Jacobs aptly describes in the preceding article. If programmatic tort is a pothole in the association's path, then consider mass tort the Grand Canyon. Mass tort can swallow up association resources, and it is so dangerous that even insurance companies are afraid of it.

What is mass tort?

The most common forms of mass torts are class actions and multidistrict litigation; both are usually claims of mass personal injury incurred by use of a particular product or as the …