In the Zostavax MDL the court dismissed 1,189 cases for failure to comply with a Lone Pine order. Compliance is a document production exercise with case-dismissal stakes, and it is almost always staffed as an afterthought.

A Lone Pine order is, in Faegre Drinker’s description, a case management order that requires all plaintiffs to produce evidence establishing specific elements of their claim. It is a filter. Cases that cannot produce get dismissed.

In re Zostavax (Zoster Vaccine Live) Products Liability Litigation, 2022 WL 17477553 (E.D. Pa. Dec. 6, 2022), the court dismissed 1,189 cases for failure to comply with such an order. That is the scale this runs at.

Why it fails as a document problem rather than a merits problem

Most non-compliance is not a plaintiff who has no case. It is a plaintiff whose records were never collected, or were collected and never organized, or were organized by someone who has since left the firm.

At plaintiff-firm scale the arithmetic is brutal. Several hundred or several thousand claimants, each needing a defined set of case-specific records, against one deadline, with a dismissal consequence per case rather than a sanction against the firm.

What the operation actually requires

• A claimant-level register of what the order requires, what has been received and what is outstanding, maintained as data rather than as a spreadsheet nobody trusts
• Records retrieval at volume, chased per provider per claimant, with the refusals and non-responses documented as diligently as the productions
• Review of each claimant’s set against the order’s elements — not a glance, a recorded determination per element
• A defensible record of the chase for anything that cannot be obtained, because an order that cannot be met is better met with documented diligence than with silence
• Submissions assembled per claimant in the form the order specifies, numbered and indexed
• Triage reporting to counsel early enough that a case which genuinely cannot comply can be dismissed voluntarily rather than involuntarily

That last point is the one that saves money. A voluntary dismissal on counsel’s timetable is a different outcome from being part of a 1,189-case order.

The crossover that matters here

This is a records retrieval problem, a coding problem and a production problem at the same time, which is why it falls between vendors. A records retrieval company will chase the providers and hand back a stack. An eDiscovery vendor will host and produce but will not chase providers. Neither will tell you which 300 claimants are about to be dismissed.

We do all three, which means the register, the chase and the per-element determination live in one place and the triage report is a query rather than a project.

On the defense side

Defendants and their counsel have the mirror problem: assessing compliance across thousands of submissions arriving in inconsistent form, and building the deficiency schedule that supports a motion. That is the same operation read backwards, and we run it from either side.

What we do

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. runs Lone Pine order compliance from Arlington, Virginia — a claimant-level register maintained as data, records retrieval at volume with documented diligence, per-element review recorded per claimant, submissions assembled to the order’s form, and triage reporting early enough to act on.

Small business, minority-owned, SAM registered. Records retrieval, coding and production in one building.

Pro-Legal Services, Inc. supports plaintiff and defense teams from Arlington, Virginia, for MDLs and coordinated proceedings nationwide.

Lone Pine order entered and a deadline on the calendar? Send us the order and the claimant count. The triage report is what tells you where you actually stand. Pro-Legal Services, Inc. · 1550 Wilson Blvd, Suite 250, Arlington, VA 22209 · 202-955-9400 · info@pro-legal.com