A court considering dismissal for violation of a court order weighs the public interest in expeditious resolution, the court's need to manage its docket, prejudice to defendants, the policy favoring merits decisions, and the availability of less drastic sanctions. The court reviews a dismissal for abuse of discretion, recognizing that dismissal is harsh but permissible when a litigant's disobedience is not outside that litigant's control.

The MDL statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1407, seeks coordinated and efficient treatment of actions sharing common factual questions. An MDL judge must move thousands of individual claims toward settlement, dispositive motion, remand, or trial while preserving each claim's individual identity. That task requires broad authority to establish workable, uniform procedures and enforce firm deadlines.

Case-management orders are central to an MDL's operation, not mere technicalities. Without compliance, defendants cannot determine which products or injuries are at issue, conduct case-specific discovery, assess settlement, or seek summary judgment; the court also cannot prepare cases for remand. The deterrent value of sanctions therefore properly carries greater weight in a large coordinated proceeding than it might in an ordinary single-plaintiff case.

The plaintiffs' failures to provide basic, case-specific information were attributable to them or their counsel and were not shown to be beyond their control. Difficulties locating clients, counsel's workload, an attorney's administrative mistake, illness, death, or communication problems did not excuse noncompliance where counsel failed to seek timely extensions, protective orders, or other relief from the court.

The first two dismissal factors strongly favored dismissal. These claims had often remained stalled for one to three years, and defendants could not begin the discovery contemplated by the CMOs without complete fact sheets and authorizations. In an MDL involving thousands of claims, persistent noncompliance also consumed judicial resources and allowed delinquent plaintiffs, rather than the court, to control the pace of litigation.

The court accepted the district judge's finding of prejudice. Prejudice may be presumed from unreasonable delay, and the missing PFS information was necessary for defendants to identify the plaintiff's claimed ingestion, injury, medical history, and relevant records. Belated or incomplete submissions after motions to dismiss did not eliminate the prejudice caused by delay.

Although the policy favoring decisions on the merits ordinarily cuts against dismissal, it offered little support to plaintiffs whose own failure to supply indispensable information prevented their cases from reaching the merits. A claim cannot be meaningfully resolved when the plaintiff will not provide the basic facts needed to litigate it.

The record also showed adequate consideration of lesser sanctions. The court progressively tightened its discovery regime through CMOs 6, 10, and 19; deferred remand until plaintiffs complied; required warning and deficiency letters; gave repeated opportunities to cure; and issued MDL-wide warnings that noncompliance could result in dismissal. In this setting, individualized, repeated warnings were not required for every one of thousands of plaintiffs.

CMO 15 properly required plaintiffs in improperly joined multi-plaintiff cases to file separate complaints stating the particular product ingested, manufacturer involved, injury alleged, and relevant dates. The original mass-joinder pleadings did not satisfy the requirements for permissive joinder because the plaintiffs' claims did not arise from the same transaction or occurrence.

Ackel and Arrington neither filed severed complaints by the original deadline nor sought extensions. Their later filings, made between roughly five and twelve weeks late, did not erase their failure to follow the court's order. The district court was entitled to interpret its own CMOs as requiring filing within the original thirty-day period, rather than treating CMO 15A as extending that deadline.

The lateness materially hindered a process designed to identify the real plaintiffs, products, and defendants in more than 200 affected actions. The district court, which was best positioned to assess the operational effect of delay in the MDL, reasonably concluded that these delays were consequential, even though it excused a separate group whose complaints were only one day late.

The court sufficiently considered proportionality. It evaluated plaintiffs' individual explanations and distinguished among degrees of delay, rather than automatically dismissing every late-filed case. It could also conclude that the plaintiffs' late compliance and information contained elsewhere in the record did not make their violation irrelevant.

Unlike the other multi-plaintiff pleadings, the McGriggs and Harris complaints already identified the sole defendant, the sole PPA product, each plaintiff's alleged injury, and the dates of injury. Their later separate complaints therefore supplied no material information that defendants did not already possess. Their five-week delay did not prevent discovery from proceeding or leave defendants uncertain about what claims they faced.

The plaintiffs' explanation—that counsel believed separate complaints unnecessary because the original pleadings already complied with the order's practical purpose—was not frivolous. That explanation required defendants to show actual prejudice, but defendants could not identify lost evidence, impaired discovery, or any other concrete harm resulting from the late filing.

The district court's generalized MDL concerns could not substitute for an individualized analysis. Although broad deference is appropriate in an MDL, each transferred plaintiff retains an individual claim and is entitled to fundamental fairness. The court could not treat these plaintiffs as casualties of a system designed to deter more serious noncompliance.

Dismissal was particularly unwarranted because CMO 15 itself did not expressly warn that missed severance deadlines would produce dismissal, and the court's oral warning came after the deadline had passed. Monetary sanctions, attorney-fee sanctions, reprimands, or other tailored measures could have enforced compliance without depriving plaintiffs of their claims.

CMO 13 required plaintiffs in multi-defendant actions to file an affirmation identifying the PPA product ingested and the responsible manufacturer or distributor. Sasseen missed the deadline but filed an untimely affirmation that repeated the product-and-defendant information already stated in her complaint.

Because the complaint had already given defendants the information that the affirmation was designed to provide, the record did not establish that the late separate document impaired discovery, prolonged the litigation in a meaningful way, or otherwise prejudiced defendants. Under the reasoning applied to McGriggs, dismissal rather than a lesser sanction was disproportionate.

Holmes filed a motion for reconsideration within ten days after entry of judgment. That motion tolled the time for filing a notice of appeal, and his notice was filed within thirty days after the denial of reconsideration. The court therefore had jurisdiction to review the dismissal.