As mass civil litigation has grown within legal jurisdictions, a new form of transnational mass litigation, which the authors term global litigation, has emerged. This litigation is characterized by parallel proceedings in multiple national jurisdictions, arising out of the same or similar factual circumstances. It typically targets the same or related multinational corporations but is brought on behalf of domestic plaintiffs, under different domestic substantive laws and applying different domestic legal procedures. The Volkswagen (VW) litigation over vehicles that were fitted with engine management software intended to mislead emission-monitoring regimes is a prime example of global litigation.

This report describes the VW litigation to illustrate the features of global litigation and the problems that arise in the resolution of these types of claims. The authors provide an overview of the procedural mechanisms that are available to resolve mass civil litigation in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, countries that have well-developed representative or aggregate litigation procedures that judges, lawyers, and parties have relied on to resolve the massive number of claims that emerged against VW. The authors also provide an overview of the VW litigation in these jurisdictions through June 2020. In addition, they summarize key themes that arose during an April 2019 roundtable on global litigation sponsored by Stanford Law School, the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, and the RAND Kenneth R. Feinberg Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation.