A Huntsville Utilities lawsuit over PFAS contamination in the Tennessee River and local groundwater is heading out of Alabama entirely, now that a national panel has ordered the case folded into a massive multidistrict litigation in South Carolina.
The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ruled that the case — filed earlier this year after being moved from Madison County Circuit Court to federal court in the federal Northern District of Alabama — will be transferred to the District of South Carolina and assigned to U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel. He oversees thousands of similar “forever chemical” lawsuits nationwide as part of “MDL No. 2873.”
An MDL (multidistrict litigation) designation is given when the federal court system bundles together a large number of similar lawsuits from all over the country and sends them to one judge, so everyone isn’t duplicating the same discovery and legal fights over and over…