RAND Institute for Civil Justice report on the abuse of medical diagnostic practices in mass tort litigation: lessons learned from the 'phantom' silica epidemic that may deter litigation screening abuse.

In June 2005, United States District Court Judge Janis Graham Jack of the Southern District of Texas issued a landmark opinion declaring that all but one of ten thousand cases aggregated for pretrial purposes under Multidistrict Litigation (“MDL”) 1553 were based on “fatally unreliable” diagnoses.1 Judge Jack found that the claims “were driven by neither health nor justice: they were manufactured for money.”2 The broad media reporting of Judge Jack’s findings sparked criminal and congressional inquiries in which the suspect doctors “took the Fifth.”3 The RAND Institute for Civil Justice recently issued a report that carefully examines the MDL 1553 litigation to identify lessons that can be learned about the civil justice system’s ability to detect and address abusive medical diagnostic practices in mass personal injury litigation.4