MDL 3060's Plaintiff Fact Sheet Cycle: Why Hair Relaxer Cases Are Dismissed

A case in MDL 3060 can be dismissed and then refiled without anything at all having been decided about it. That is not a loophole or a mistake. It is the enforcement mechanism the court chose, and the document that governs it is an order most people whose cases are affected will never read.

What the docket actually contains

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation’s report dated October 1, 2026 records 12,381 actions pending in MDL 3060, against 16,828 historical actions. That makes it one of the larger active MDLs by pending actions — and it means the court is managing a caseload far too large to move one case at a time.

The litigation is consolidated before Judge Mary M. Rowland in the Northern District of Illinois under master docket number 23 C 818.

The mechanism: dismiss to enforce, not to decide

Case Management Order No. 9 requires a plaintiff to provide a Plaintiff Fact Sheet — a standardised questionnaire and authorisation set that lets the defendants obtain medical and employment records. Without it, the defendants cannot evaluate the claim and the court cannot move the case.

The order the court entered on June 25, 2025 sets out what happens when that has not occurred. Cases are dismissed without prejudice. The court’s own language is explicit about the consequence, and it is worth reading closely:

Plaintiffs may only refile their cases in federal court within this MDL and Plaintiffs must serve complete PFSs and authorizations pursuant to CMO 9 within 10 business days of refiling or the reinstatement of their cases.

Three things follow from that sentence, and each is the kind of detail that decides outcomes:

1. The claim is not decided. Dismissal without prejudice removes the case from the active docket. It is not a ruling on whether the product caused an injury.
2. Refiling is confined to this MDL. A plaintiff cannot take the same case and file it somewhere more convenient.
3. The clock restarts at refiling. Ten business days, measured from refiling or reinstatement, to serve a complete fact sheet and authorisations. Refiling a case without a complete fact sheet simply returns it to the same position.

Why the dates are not one date

The order does not set a single refiling deadline for everyone. It ties the deadline to the month the plaintiff appears on a Court Call List:

Following entry of this Case Management Order, the deadline by which a Plaintiff must refile or move for reinstatement of her case will be determined by the month the Plaintiff is included on a Court Call List.

So a plaintiff listed on a Court Call List between April and September runs on one timetable, and later groups run on another. The order states the cycle repeats into the future until the CMO 9 process concludes.

This is the part most often misread from the outside. Two cases filed on the same day can carry different refiling deadlines, because the deadline depends on when the case reached the call list, not when it was filed.

What this means in practice

If you are trying to work out where a particular case stands, a single date is almost never enough. Four things determine the position:

• whether the case is currently on the docket or has been dismissed
• the month the case appeared on a Court Call List
• whether a complete Plaintiff Fact Sheet and authorisations were served
• if the case was refiled, how many of the ten business days have run

The court has continued to issue case management orders through 2026, and decisions in this docket are filed under the same case number — the September 2026 ruling in the litigation, for instance, is filed in 23 C 818 before Judge Rowland.

The point of the cycle

A dismissal without prejudice sounds procedural to the point of being meaningless. It is not. It is the court converting an outstanding record-gathering obligation into a consequence, on a schedule it can administer across more than twelve thousand cases at once — without ever reaching the underlying question of whether any product caused any particular injury. Those questions are what a trial would decide, and this order is designed to make sure that only cases capable of being tried reach that stage.

Where to check a specific case

Docket-level detail lives in the court’s own records, not in summaries. The Northern District of Illinois maintains the MDL 3060 docket, and orders are filed under case number 23 C 818. Pending-action counts come from the JPML’s periodic statistics reports, which are published with a report date and should be quoted with that date attached rather than treated as a live figure.

This article is general information about how the procedure works. It is not legal advice and it does not tell you whether any particular claim has merit.