Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play Sleeper.

A federal judicial panel has bounced 15 lawsuits to New York over this year’s recall of 4.7 million Rock ‘n Play infant sleepers sold by Fisher-Price Inc.

Thursday’s order, by the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, comes on the same day that the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced that another company, Dorel Juvenile Group, had recalled 24,000 Eddie Bauer and Disney infant sleepers. The Dorel recall referenced infant fatalities with other sleepers; the Rock ‘N Play sleepers were tied to 32 deaths, as well as hundreds of injuries such as flat heads and twisted necks in infants.

The MDL panel sent the Rock ‘N Play cases to the Western District of New York. In the ruling, the panel disagreed with most of the plaintiffs attorneys, who had objected to an MDL. Yet panelists selected a venue that the plaintiffs attorneys suggested would be appropriate in the event of an MDL.

“This district has a strong connection to these cases,” wrote the panel’s chairwoman Sarah Vance, noting that Fisher-Price is based in East Aurora and that “critical events and decisions underlying plaintiffs’ claims” occurred there. She also wrote that 10 of the cases were in the Western District of New York.

The panel disagreed with Mattel Inc., parent company of Fisher-Price, which had moved to create an MDL in the Central District of California near its headquarters in El Segundo, California. Mattel had criticized the “overcrowded dockets of the judges” in the Western District of New York and accused plaintiffs lawyers of “obvious forum shopping” because many had refiled their cases in the Western District of California.

U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford of the District of Vermont will oversee the MDL. He is chief judge of the District of Vermont and an appointee of President Barack Obama but sits as a visiting judge at the Western District of New York. He has not yet overseen an MDL.

Mattel’s voluntary recall April 12 cited risks that infants could suffocate if they rolled from their backs to their stomachs or sides. The recall provides full refunds to consumers who purchased the products as of Oct. 12, at prices that range from $40 to $149, while others would receive vouchers.

The lawsuits, most of which allege no injuries, said the recall is inadequate, in part because it limited refunds to consumers who owned the sleepers for six months or less. The suits also target what they called Fisher-Price’s deceptive and misleading marketing of the product for overnight sleep, despite recommendations from pediatricians that babies should sleep flat on their backs.

In a statement released on the day of the recall, Mattel urged parents to stop using the product. It also suggested that some parents had not followed warnings on the box.

Plaintiffs attorneys, in opposing an MDL, had suggested that the lawsuits, most of which are class actions alleging consumer fraud, were not that complex. But the panel, agreeing with Mattel, predicted that the litigation would involve expert discovery on several topics.

“The plaintiffs opposing centralization do not dispute the existence of common factual issues, but they argue that these factual issues are not sufficiently complex to warrant centralization,” Vance wrote. “We reject this argument. Discovery regarding the design of the RNPS (Rock ‘n Play sleeper) and whether it unreasonably increases the risk of positional asphyxiation in infants likely will be more akin to the discovery required in products liability litigations than run-of-the-mill false advertising lawsuits, with expert testimony required on a number of complicated topics, such as the suitability of the RNPS for prolonged sleeping by infants.”