Concept
Managing Broad Joinder
Joinder of claims
Managing Broad Joinder
Rule 18(a) lets a party asserting a claim, counterclaim, crossclaim, or third-party claim join, "as independent or alternative claims, as many claims as it has against an opposing party."1 The rule never asks whether those claims are related, so a single complaint may combine an assault claim, an unpaid debt, and a lease dispute.2 A first reaction is that a rule so open must produce unmanageable lawsuits, with a jury asked to follow several unconnected stories at once. The Federal Rules answer by moving the point of control. The complaint faces no screen for how its claims fit together; the court does its managing later, when it shapes the trial.3
Consider a defendant who moves to dismiss a complaint because it joins an assault claim with an unrelated contract claim against the same defendant. The motion fails. A rule like Rule 18(a) places no limit on how many claims, related or unrelated, a plaintiff may bring against the defendant, so misjoinder is impossible at the pleading stage.4 The defendant's real worries, jury confusion and the convenience of trying every claim in one suit, are decided at the trial stage, where the court may order severance of one or more claims for a separate trial.5 The defendant needs a different motion, one aimed at how the case will be tried and not at whether it may be pleaded.
The design is deliberate. Rule 18 must be read together with Rule 42(b), which lets the court order the separate trial of any claim or issue, so joinder is no longer rigidly restricted at the pleading stage but is a matter of the court's discretion in shaping the trial.6 Its lineage runs through equity. The common law tied many procedural rules to the goal of reducing litigation to the fewest possible issues, a limit equity courts never imposed, and procedural reform and the merger of law and equity extended equity's joinder procedures, especially those that let complex cases be resolved in a single action.7 The practical logic is easy to see: how much two claims overlap is easier to judge when a court is organizing the actual trial than when it is reading a complaint.
The principal tool is Rule 42(b), under which "[f]or convenience, to avoid prejudice, or to expedite and economize, the court may order a separate trial for one or more separate issues [or] claims."8 Each ground answers a different cost of a crowded trial. Convenience addresses the burden of sitting through proof that bears on one claim only. Avoiding prejudice protects against evidence on one claim coloring a jury's view of another. Expediting and economizing keeps the case from consuming more than it should.
The need is easiest to see in a dispute between a large technology company and one of its major business partners. Rule 18(a) lets either side join every claim it has against the other, and the range of claims is enormous. The Rules solve the resulting trial-management problem by permitting the judge, under Rule 42(b), to sever claims for trial convenience, and a severed claim may be as distinct for pretrial and trial purposes as if the plaintiff had brought an entirely separate suit.9
Severance has a counterpart that runs the other way. Rule 21 provides that any claim against a party may be severed and proceeded with separately.10 Consolidation, by contrast, permits the amalgamation of actions or issues that share at least one common question of law or fact: a court may consolidate two or more entire actions, require a joint hearing or trial of the common issues, or combine actions or issues only for the pretrial phase.11 Its obvious virtue is productivity, because it arranges for simultaneous resolution of issues or entire actions.12 Separating and combining together give the judge room to fit a proceeding to the case in front of the court.
Hohlbein v. Heritage Mutual Insurance Co. shows that this discretion can be exercised against the party asking. The court reviewed the plaintiffs' complaint, weighed the parties' arguments for and against a motion to sever the plaintiffs' claims, described the question as a close one, and denied the motion.13 The ruling rested on a settled premise: a motion to sever is committed to the broad discretion of the trial judge.14 A defendant's request invokes the power but does not compel its use. And because claims joined under Rule 18(a) cannot be misjoined, severing them reflects a decision about how to try the case and not a finding that the complaint was defective.15
The breadth of joinder also explains Rule 54(b). The Rules allow a plaintiff to state in one complaint as many separate claims as it has, which once meant that a final decision on one claim could sit idle until every other claim was decided. In Gelboim v. Bank of America Corp., the Court explained that Rule 54(b) relaxes the former practice that, in multiple-claims actions, all the claims had to be finally decided before an appeal could be entertained from a final decision on any of them.16 The rule was adopted in view of the breadth of the civil action the Rules allow, to avoid the possible injustice of delaying judgment on a distinctly separate claim until the entire case is adjudicated.17
Taken together, these devices show how so open a rule stays workable. The pleader joins freely, and the defendant's recourse is a request to the trial judge, who may try claims separately or sever them as the case warrants. The usual exam error is to treat unrelatedness as a ground for dismissal, when unrelatedness bears only on the judge's discretionary choices about how the claims will be tried.