Group litigation orders: sharing the spotlight

• When more than one group of claimants has formed in Australia, the court’s approach has increasingly been to conduct a ‘beauty parade’ to determine which one group proceeds.
• This ignores a claimant’s right to choose its own solicitors and fund its litigation how it sees fit; the UK’s group litigation order regime provides a solution to this.

According to HM Courts & Tribunals Service, there have been 105 group litigation orders (GLOs) made in proceedings since the introduction of the GLO into the Civil Procedure Rules on 2 May 2000. The list is not entirely comprehensive, but the bulk of these GLOs have been made in disparate—although mainly consumer-focused—areas such as product liability claims, tax disputes, environmental claims, and industrial disease claims, with the most recent being made in the VW NOx Emissions Group litigation (date of order: 11 May 2018). Only a few, so far, have