The upheaval that COVID-19 has inflicted on courts and law firms has yet to significantly interrupt the stream of new suits being filed in New Jersey's federal courts.

An analysis of PACER filings for the District of New Jersey in the first quarter of 2020 showed a 5% decline from the same period in 2019. But filings for the month of March were up by 19% when compared with March 2019. The data reflects both criminal filings and civil cases of all kinds.

The robust filing data for March could be an indicator for a minimal impact from COVID-19 on mass tort cases, since March is when the virus began to have a significant impact on the legal profession. A series of measures by New Jersey's federal courts to curtail their operations due to the pandemic began on March 16, and on March 21 New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed an executive order calling on law offices to institute work-from-home arrangements for attorneys and staff.

Raw data from the first quarter of 2020 shows a 54% decline in the number of suits filed compared with the same period in 2019. But the 2019 data is skewed by a one-week surge that brought in more than 5,000 cases in late January of that year. In a typical week 300 to 400 cases are filed in the District of New Jersey. When the anomalous one-week surge in January 2019 is disregarded, 4,025 suits were filed in the first quarter of 2019, and 3,811 were filed in the same period in 2020.

Filings in January were down 13% from February 2019. Filings from the last week of January were omitted due to the unusual surge in 2019 filing. Filings in February were down 11% from February 2019.

The coronavirus' minimal impact on filings in the District of New Jersey comes as multidistrict litigation, most related to drugs and medical devices, remains a big piece of the caseload. And the sturdy volume of multidistrict litigation in New Jersey is not expected to change even as lawyers who file those cases cope with the challenges of working from home and minding children whose school's physical campus has been closed.

"In the long run, I don't think things have changed in such a way to materially affect the way plaintiffs file mass tort cases," said Joshua Kincannon, a member of the defective drug and device litigation team at Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer in Woodbridge. "If anything, it's actually helpful because everybody is home," and available to communicate with their attorney, instead of being at work and harder to reach, Kincannon said.

Before the coronavirus, the most challenging aspect to preparing a case for filing was client communication, since a prospective client might be at work when the law firm calls to ask them to sign a retainer or authorize acquisition of medical records, Kincannon said.

New Jersey is likely to continue to experience a strong volume of drug defect lawsuits from plaintiffs across the nation because of the large number of drug and medical device companies operating in the state and because of the 2017 Supreme Court ruling in Bristol-Myers Squibb  v. Superior Court of California, which restricted venue-shopping, Kincannon said.

"There's nothing that COVID-19 does to change that or make some other state more appealing," he said.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Kincannon says he has reassured plaintiffs from other parts of the country that when they bring a mass tort case in a New Jersey court, they are unlikely to have to travel to New Jersey for court proceedings, unless their case is picked for a bellwether trial. And if that happens, it won't be for some time and a vaccine for coronavirus will most likely be available by then, he says.

Adam Slater, who represents plaintiffs in drug and medical device suits at Mazie, Slater, Katz & Freeman in Roseland, likewise sees no disruption to the volume of multidistrict litigation in federal courts as a result of the coronavirus.

"I think if you have a case and it's a viable case, you're going to file it in the same way you would have" before the pandemic, Slater said.

Although some judges are waiving the statute of limitations for filing in some cases, lawyers still have to avoid filing late, since such decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, Slater said.

"If you've already committed to a litigation, you need to move things along. There's going to come a day when the courts go closer to what would be considered normal, and you have to be ready," Slater said.

Christopher Placitella, of Cohen, Placitella & Roth in Red Bank, said the coronavirus could cut down on filings from those prospective plaintiffs who want to meet their lawyer in person before their suit is filed, but that group is a small minority, he said.

"I don't think it's going to materially change filings," Placitella said. "Our volume of new client inquiries has not significantly changed."