Juul e-cigarette. Photo: Steve Heap/Shutterstock.com.

A federal judicial panel has ordered that lawsuits against Juul Labs Inc. go to San Francisco,  home to the electronic cigarette maker's headquarters, before U.S. District Judge William Orrick of the Northern District of California.

Wednesday's order, by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, comes after dozens of lawyers packed a Los Angeles courtroom last week to argue over which judge should oversee about 55 lawsuits against Juul. Juul and some plaintiffs attorneys had supported Orrick, who is overseeing several of the cases, but some had preferred sending the cases to New Jersey before U.S. District Judge Brian Martinotti of the District of New Jersey.

"JLI is headquartered in that district, and it represents that most of the key evidence and witnesses are located there," wrote MDL panel chairwoman Sarah Vance, who sits on the Eastern District of Louisiana. Orrick, she wrote, "has been presiding over most of the California actions since they were filed and already has ruled on two motions to dismiss."

U.S. District Judge William Orrick III, Northern District of California

The lawsuits include class actions, which alleged Juul's misleading marketing failed to disclose the nicotine in its products, causing young adults and teenagers to get addicted, and personal injury cases focused on pulmonary disease, seizures and other serious health problems. Last week, Juul announced that CEO Kevin Burns would step down immediately and the company would suspend all advertisements of its products. The new CEO, K.C. Crosthwaite, comes from Philip Morris USA parent corporation Altria Group Inc., which has a 35% stake in Juul.

Juul also faces mounting regulatory pressure from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which is investigating Juul's marketing claims to children, as have many state attorneys general.

In a separate order Wednesday, the MDL panel sent more than 50 lawsuits against Capital One over last year's data breach to U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga of the Eastern District of Virginia. The Capital One breach compromised the personal information, including Social Security numbers, of 100 million customers in the United States and 6 million in Canada.

Capital One is based in McLean, Virginia—a fact noted by the panel in its decision. The panel also said documents and witnesses were in that district.

"Moreover, the AWS defendants maintain that relevant witnesses and evidence are located in an AWS facility located in Northern Virginia," Vance wrote, referring to Amazon Web Services, where the alleged hacker, Paige Thompson, previously worked, and where the hacked data was stored on a cloud-based system.

Trenga, who sits in Alexandria, Virginia, previously oversaw multidistrict litigation against Lumber Liquidators over its wood flooring.

In a third order, the panel sent four patent infringement cases involving a shoulder rehabilitation device made by Atlanta's OneDirect Health Network Inc. to a judge in the Southern District of Florida who is new to multidistrict litigation. That district, the panel wrote, is where the inventor and original distributor were located.

The panel's pick, U.S. District Judge Roy Altman of the Southern District of Florida, worked at Miami's Podhurst Orseck before President Donald Trump appointed him to serve on the Fort Lauderdale, Florida, federal bench, which he joined April 9. He also oversaw the criminal case against Yujing Zhang, a Chinese national, convicted last month for trespassing and lying to federal agents at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

Altman is 37 years old.