A federal judicial panel has ordered dozens of lawsuits against Intel, Apple and Uber into multidistrict litigation—but only one docket went to California's increasingly congested district in the Bay Area.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent 61 cases over alleged defects in iPhone batteries to U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who sits in San Jose, California, near defendant Apple Inc.'s headquarters in Cupertino. Plaintiffs attorneys and Apple, represented by Theodore Boutrous of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, had each supported the Northern District of California.

“This district has a strong connection to these cases,” wrote MDL Panel Chairwoman Sarah Vance, noting that the majority of the cases were in the Northern District of California, which lawyers on both sides supported. “Apple is headquartered within, and the critical events and decisions underlying plaintiffs' claims occurred in, the Northern District of California.”

But the panel resisted requests to send cases to that same district over Uber Technologies Inc.'s data breach, which compromised the personal information of 37 million people, and lawsuits alleging Intel Corp.'s processors had security flaws and that the fixes caused slower speeds. Instead, the panel sent the 17 Uber cases to U.S. District Judge Philip Gutierrez of the Central District of California, and 35 lawsuits against Intel to U.S. District Judge Michael Simon of the District of Oregon. San Francisco-based Uber and Intel, based in Santa Clara, California, had supported that slate of judges over those in California's Northern District.

The panel did not cite congestion as a factor in its decisions. But Uber attorney E. Desmond Hogan of Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C., and James Vlahakis of Chicago's Sulaiman Law Group, a plaintiffs attorney who wanted the Uber cases sent to the Northern District of Illinois, mentioned the Northern District of California's backlog as a reason to avoid the Bay Area. The district has the second largest number of MDLs in the country, according to the panel's statistics as of March 15. Davila, in particular, has a one of the largest backlogs in the district.

There were factors at play other than congestion, however.

Rachel Rodman of Williams & Connolly had argued that Intel's security team was in Hillsboro, Oregon, not Silicon Valley—details that the panel acknowledged in its order on Thursday. “Intel has extensive operations there, including its employees who evaluated the security vulnerabilities and developed patches to mitigate them, as well as the team that led the development of the first Intel processor to use speculative execution. It is likely, therefore, that relevant evidence and witnesses will be located in this district.”

In its Uber order on Wednesday, the panel wrote that three cases were pending in the Central District of California and that two plaintiffs supported the district as their second choice. The panel found that California “has a significant connection to this litigation, as Uber Technologies Inc. has its headquarters in this state, where much of the common evidence, including witnesses, will be located.”

Uber had its own reasons to avoid California's Northern District, where it had faced a difficult road in unrelated litigation over the classification of its drivers and a trade secrets fight with Google subsidiary Waymo. And U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh, a San Jose judge, has come out with dismissal rulings in favor of the plaintiffs in the Anthem and Yahoo data breach MDLs.

Uber's support of Gutierrez was contingent on whether the MDL panel ordered coordination. Uber actually opposed coordination, citing cases in state court brought by the cities of Chicago and Los Angeles and Washington state over its data breach, and arbitration agreements that riders signed.

Those arguments were “unconvincing,” Vance wrote in the panel's order.

“We decline Uber's suggestion to delay ruling on centralization until their motions to compel arbitration are decided, as the timing and outcome of such rulings in this growing litigation is highly speculative,” she wrote.