Rule 26.03 Application

When a group of related lawsuits gets sent to a special panel of judges to handle as "mass litigation," these rules are the ones that apply to those cases. The Chief Justice of the state Supreme Court decides which cases get transferred this way, usually when many similar lawsuits are filed and it makes sense to handle them together instead of separately in different courtrooms.

These rules only control how the mass litigation cases move through the system once they're transferred. They don't take away any power that circuit courts already have under the law. They also don't create any new legal claims that people could not already bring. In short, the rules just set up a process for handling large groups of similar cases more efficiently, without changing what rights people have or what courts are allowed to do.