Lone Pine Order

A Lone Pine order is a case management order, named for the New Jersey trial court decision in Lore v. Lone Pine Corp. (1986), requiring plaintiffs in a mass tort docket to make a threshold evidentiary showing — typically an expert report or sworn statement establishing exposure, injury, and a causal link to the defendant's product — before the case may proceed further, often before full merits discovery begins. Defendants favor Lone Pine orders as an early screening mechanism to identify and dismiss weak or unsupportable claims filed to hold a place on the docket without a genuine evidentiary basis, a pattern common in dockets built through mass advertising and rapid intake. Plaintiffs' counsel typically oppose them as an improper attempt to impose a summary-judgment-level burden before discovery has occurred, and courts are divided on their propriety — some transferee judges decline to enter them at all as inconsistent with normal pretrial sequencing, while others use narrower versions limited to specific red-flag categories of claims. Where entered, a Lone Pine order can dismiss a substantial share of a docket's weakest claims in a single event, materially reshaping the size and composition of the remaining plaintiff pool.

A Lone Pine order is a portfolio-level event risk for any funder with docket-wide exposure, because it can dismiss a meaningful share of intake volume — including claims a funder has already advanced capital against — in a compressed window. Underwriting a docket subject to a pending or likely Lone Pine motion requires assessing the underlying quality of the claim inventory, since firms that intake cases with weak documentation of exposure or diagnosis carry materially higher exposure to mass dismissal.

Funders increasingly condition docket financing on evidence of rigorous intake screening precisely to reduce this risk.