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WASHINGTON (October 19, 2021) - The George Washington University Law School announced a major new initiative for its James F. Humphreys Complex Litigation Center. Under the initiative, the Center will hold five annual bench-bar conferences and develop substantive projects designed to improve the handling of class actions, e-discovery, and multi-district litigations in the federal courts.
“A key part of the initiative has been the hiring of John Rabiej, who ran similar conferences at Duke Law School for seven years,” Dayna Bowen Matthew, dean of the GW Law School, said. Before his time at Duke, Rabiej worked for the Administrative Office of the US Courts in the rules program, where he assisted scores of federal judges.
The Center held its first in-person conference in over two years on October 7 and 8, focusing on the management of mass-tort multi-district litigation cases, which currently comprise about 60% of all civil cases pending in the federal district courts. The Center hosted three online conferences between November 2020 and June 2021, under the leadership of Rabiej and the Center’s co-directors, Roger Trangsrud and Alan Morrison. The first day of the October event featured six panels of experienced plaintiff and defense multi-district litigation lawyers debating relevant practices before an audience of 100 lawyers and 35 federal judges. The next day, in a judges-only session, 10 experienced multi-district litigation judges reacted to the previous day’s discussion for the benefit of 25 judges who had never handled a multi-district litigation case.
The Center was established in 2005 through a generous gift from GW Law alumnus James F. Humphreys, a prominent West Virginia lawyer. It will host its second annual class action conference on November 11-12 and other events are scheduled for 2022. In addition, it has embarked on several major projects designed to improve the way that complex litigations are handled. The Center has issued guidelines and best practices promoting diversity in the appointment of leadership in class actions and multi-district litigation cases with more than 100 law firm, company, and bar organization signatories. It is working on a new proportionality assessment model that focuses on the thorny issue of proportionality in electronic discovery. Guidelines and best practices governing class actions and mass-tort multi-district litigations are being drafted by volunteer bench-bar teams and collected in two compendia, which will be updated and supplemented after every annual bench-bar conference held by the Center.