Some of the most pressing legal issues in agriculture of recent years have attracted large numbers of plaintiffs — mostly farmers who felt they had been wronged. The GMO rice lawsuit, for example, had 9,000 plaintiffs.

In an effort to expedite the handling of such cases, the Supreme Court handed down guidance urging lower courts to combine such cases when possible under Multi-District Litigation or MDL cases. Accordingly, cases involving off-target application of dicamba have been moved to one court in Missouri.

John Tull, founding partner of Quattlebaum, Grooms and Tull PLLC, in Little Rock, Ark., and Jerry Kelly of the Kelly Law Firm in Lonoke, Ark., talked about MDLs and where the dicamba drift cases may go in the months ahead during a presentation at the Mid-South Agricultural and Environmental Law Conference in Memphis, Tenn.