Southern District Judges Lorna Schofield and Paul Engelmayer are among 17 first-time judges to receive cases by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation starting last year.

For the first time in at least five years, the majority of judges chosen to oversee an MDL had never done it before, according to a review of the panel's assignments by New York Law Journal affiliate The National Law Journal.

Among the new initiates to the complex world of MDL litigation are Ketanji Brown Jackson in Washington, D.C., Vince Chhabria in San Francisco and Brian Martinotti in New Jersey—all Obama appointees, as are Schofield and Engelmayer, who were confirmed in July 2011 and December 2012, respectively.