Census Order (Registration Order)

A census order, sometimes called a registration order, is a case management order requiring every law firm with potential claims related to the MDL's subject matter — including claims not yet formally filed — to register basic identifying and claim information with the court or a court-approved claims administrator by a specified deadline. Unlike a short-form complaint, which formally commences an individual lawsuit, a census registration is often a lower-burden, non-adversarial data collection exercise designed to give the transferee court, the parties, and any eventual settlement administrator an accurate count of the total universe of potential claims — including unfiled claims held by counsel pending investigation — well before every claimant has actually filed suit. Census orders have become increasingly common in settlement-oriented MDLs, because an accurate claim count is a prerequisite to structuring an aggregate settlement fund, negotiating a global resolution, and calculating the enrollment percentage needed to satisfy a defendant's participation threshold. Some census orders carry consequences for non-compliance, including preclusion from participating in an eventual settlement, which gives firms a strong incentive to register even claims still in the investigation or pre-suit stage.

Census data is one of the few objective, docket-wide measures of total claim volume available before a settlement is reached, and funders use it to validate a firm's or aggregator's represented claim count independent of self-reported figures. Because census registration often captures unfiled and pre-suit claims, it also gives funders early visibility into the true size of a firm's future case pipeline.

That visibility matters directly to underwriting a docket-level facility sized against total expected claim volume rather than only currently filed cases.