A Maryland Judge Refused a Stay Pending JPML Transfer Six Days Before the Nevro MDL Hearing

A Maryland federal judge refused on 18 September 2026 to pause a spinal cord stimulator case while the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation decides whether to centralize it, holding that a stay would not promote judicial economy because the action could reach trial within the next year. The ruling, by Senior U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett in DiToto v. Nevro Corporation, No. 1:25-cv-01388 (D. Md.), is a reminder that a motion to stay pending JPML transfer is discretionary, not automatic, and that the further a case has travelled, the worse the movant's odds get.

The timing is what makes it worth reading. Six days later, on 24 September 2026, the Panel hears argument in Chicago on whether to create MDL No. 3195, In re: Nevro Corporation Spinal Cord Stimulator Products Liability Litigation. If the Panel grants the petition, the transferee judge will inherit a docket in which at least one constituent case has already survived preemption, cleared the pleadings and been told it is going to trial. That is an unusual inheritance, and it changes what a Nevro MDL would be for.

What Judge Bennett decided on the motion to stay pending JPML transfer

The motion asked the District of Maryland to stay all proceedings in DiToto until the Panel ruled on the Nevro centralization petition. It is the standard request: the Panel sits roughly every other month, a ruling usually follows argument within a week or two, and a movant can therefore describe the requested pause as short, contained and administratively tidy.

Judge Bennett declined. The reasoning reported from the order is narrow and practical rather than doctrinal: a stay would not promote judicial economy, because the case could proceed to trial in the next year, and it therefore should not be prolonged any further. That is a ruling about this docket's position on the calendar, not a statement that stays pending transfer are disfavoured generally.

Three features of the order deserve attention.

First, it treats judicial economy as a two-sided factor rather than a one-way ratchet. The usual argument for a stay is that any work the transferor court does will be duplicated or wasted if the Panel transfers the case. That argument has real force at the start of a case, when the pending work is a motion to dismiss that a transferee judge will decide for dozens of cases at once. It has much less force at the end, when the pending work is a pretrial conference, a Daubert schedule and a jury.

Second, it treats trial proximity as the decisive fact. A case that is a year from trial is not a case awaiting coordinated pretrial proceedings; it is a case that has finished most of them. Section 1407 authorises transfer for pretrial proceedings only, and the Panel remands cases for trial when pretrial work is complete. Transferring a trial-ready action into a new MDL would run the statute backwards.

Third, it is a district-court ruling that pointedly does not wait for the Panel. Nothing in the order purports to predict what happens on 24 September. It does not need to.

Does a pending JPML motion stop a district court from moving a case forward?

No. The pendency of a Section 1407 motion does not suspend anything in the district court, and it does not limit that court's pretrial jurisdiction. Panel Rule 2.1(d) says so in terms: the pendency of a motion, order to show cause, conditional transfer order or conditional remand order before the Panel does not affect or suspend orders and pretrial proceedings in any pending federal district court action, and does not limit the pretrial jurisdiction of that court.

This is the single most misunderstood point in Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) practice, and it cuts in both directions. A defendant that files a centralization petition acquires no right to a pause. A plaintiff whose case is named on a Panel schedule loses no right to press for a ruling. Until an order of transfer actually issues, the transferor judge holds the case and everything in it.

What the rule does not do is take away the district court's discretion to grant a stay anyway. Courts retain the inherent power to control their own dockets, and most exercise it in favour of a stay when a Section 1407 motion is pending. The practical consequence is a default that looks like a rule but is not one: stays pending transfer are commonly granted, routinely unopposed, and entirely defeasible on the right facts. DiToto is what the right facts look like.

It is worth noting that the Panel itself takes the same view of stay requests addressed to it. In In re: Google Digital Advertising Antitrust Litigation, MDL No. 3010, the Panel entered an order denying a stay, consistent with its long-standing position that a party seeking to halt district-court activity should ask the district court, not the Panel, and that the Panel's own docket does not freeze anyone else's.

The motion to stay pending JPML transfer standard, and why judicial economy cut the other way

District courts deciding whether to stay proceedings pending a Panel ruling generally weigh three things: prejudice to the non-moving party from a delay, hardship to the moving party from going forward, and the interests of judicial economy — conserving the court's resources and avoiding inconsistent rulings across parallel cases.

In the run of cases the three factors line up neatly for the movant. Prejudice to the plaintiff is slight because the pause is measured in weeks. Hardship to the defendant is real because it faces duplicative motion practice in several districts at once. Judicial economy favours a stay because the transferee judge will decide the same questions once instead of seven times. That is why the reported decisions are lopsided: the great majority of published rulings grant the stay, and many law-firm summaries of the standard describe judicial economy as the factor that weighs most heavily in favour of granting one.

DiToto inverts the third factor without disputing the first two. The economy argument depends on there being duplicative pretrial work left to duplicate. Where the transferor court has already resolved the dispositive preemption motion, already fixed the scope of the case and already put it on a trial track, transfer does not save judicial resources; it spends them. The transferee judge would have to absorb a case whose pretrial history is complete, hold it through the MDL's common-benefit discovery, and then suggest remand under Section 1407(a) so that the original district could try it — which is where it already was.

The prejudice side reinforces the point once a trial date is in view. A stay of "a few weeks pending the Panel's ruling" is not, in a case that has been pending since 2025 and involves an alleged 2022 injury, a few weeks. If the Panel grants the petition, the pause runs from the stay order through transfer, through the transferee court's initial case management conference, through the leadership application process, and through whatever pretrial programme the new MDL adopts. In a young MDL, that is measured in years, not weeks. Courts that focus on the nominal length of the requested stay understate it; the order in DiToto reads as though the court did not.

The table below sets out how the three factors typically present, and how they presented here.

Factor	Typical posture in an early-stage case	Posture in DiToto on 18 September 2026
Prejudice to the non-movant	Slight; the Panel rules within weeks of argument	Substantial; the practical pause runs through transfer and a new MDL's pretrial programme
Hardship to the movant absent a stay	Real; duplicative motion practice across several districts	Limited; the dispositive motion in this district was decided in May 2026
Judicial economy	Favours a stay; the transferee judge decides common issues once	Favours denial; the pretrial work is substantially done and transfer would duplicate it
Case posture	Pleadings or early discovery	Post-dismissal-motion, on a track to trial within a year
Net result	Stay commonly granted	Stay denied

The case behind the order: DiToto v. Nevro

The plaintiff, Perry DiToto, received a Senza II spinal cord stimulation system in October 2020. The device is a neuromodulation implant intended to treat chronic pain by delivering electrical impulses to the spinal cord, and it is regulated through the Food and Drug Administration's premarket approval pathway. Roughly two years after implantation, the complaint alleges, the device malfunctioned during a remote adjustment performed by a company representative and delivered extremely painful electrical jolts, producing lasting pain, mobility problems and long-term impairment. The defendants are Nevro Corporation and Globus Medical, Inc.

The case had already produced a significant ruling before September. On 21 May 2026, Judge Bennett largely denied the defendants' motion to dismiss, allowing eight of the nine counts to proceed and dismissing only the implied warranty claim. The surviving counts include product liability theories, negligence, fraudulent and negligent misrepresentation, breach of express warranty and a Maryland consumer protection claim.

The preemption analysis is the part that matters for the litigation as a whole. A Class III device approved through premarket approval carries express preemption of state requirements that are different from, or in addition to, federal requirements. The recognised escape route is the parallel claim: a state-law duty that mirrors a federal regulatory requirement rather than adding to it. Judge Bennett found that DiToto had adequately pleaded a deviation from the device's premarket approval specifications in manufacturing, that failure-to-report claims were not preempted, and that a claim founded on the failure to train sales representatives could proceed as ordinary negligence rather than as a disguised attack on the approved design or labelling.

That is a meaningful result for a device Mass Tort at this stage. It gives claimants' counsel a template for pleading around express preemption in spinal cord stimulator cases, and it explains why the same court was unwilling four months later to hand the case to someone else.

What the spinal cord stimulator cases actually allege

The procedural fight only makes sense against the substance of the claims, and the substance is unusually varied for a device litigation. Spinal cord stimulation systems are implanted neuromodulation devices: a pulse generator placed under the skin, leads threaded into the epidural space, and a patient controller. They are prescribed for chronic pain that has not responded to other treatment, often after failed back surgery. Because they are Class III devices cleared through premarket approval, they carry the strongest preemption defence available to a manufacturer, which is why gateway rulings such as the May 2026 decision in DiToto matter more here than they would in a pharmaceutical Mass Tort.

The alleged failure modes fall into a handful of recurring groups, and they are not interchangeable. That heterogeneity is the centrepiece of the manufacturers' opposition to centralization, and it is also why a motion to stay pending JPML transfer is a harder sell in this litigation than in one built on a single defect.

Alleged failure mode	Typical claim theory	Typical consequence pleaded
Lead migration or fracture	Design Defect; manufacturing deviation from premarket approval specifications	Loss of pain coverage; revision surgery to reposition or replace leads
Unintended stimulation or shocks	Manufacturing defect; negligent programming or remote adjustment	Acute pain events; falls; explant
Infection at the generator pocket or lead track	Manufacturing defect; Failure to Warn about infection rates	Explant surgery; sepsis in severe cases
Device malfunction and premature battery or generator failure	Manufacturing defect; failure to report adverse events to the FDA	Revision or replacement surgery
Neurological injury	Design Defect; failure to train implanting clinicians or representatives	Permanent nerve damage; paralysis in the most serious claims

Two structural features of these claims shape everything that follows. The first is that damages turn on surgical history rather than on a diagnosis: a claimant who needed a revision has a different case from one who needed an explant, who has a different case again from one left with permanent neurological deficit. There is no Settlement Matrix in this litigation yet, and building one would be harder than in a single-injury docket. The second is that the defendants are separate companies with separate devices, separate approval files and separate adverse-event histories, which is precisely why the Panel has been asked to build three dockets rather than one.

Is there a Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDL?

Not yet. As of 22 September 2026 there is no centralized Nevro proceeding, and Nevro cases are being litigated individually in the districts where they were filed. The petition to create one — MDL No. 3195 — was filed on 26 June 2026 and covers 17 actions pending in six districts. It is set for oral argument before the Panel on 24 September 2026 at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago.

A parallel petition, MDL No. 3194, seeks a separate Abbott Laboratories docket covering 15 actions across seven districts. Both petitions ask the Panel to send the cases to the Central District of California, where Judge Josephine L. Staton is already presiding over MDL No. 3181 against Boston Scientific. Abbott and Nevro both oppose centralization, arguing that the actions do not share sufficiently uniform defects, injuries or numbers to justify coordinated proceedings.

The manufacturer-by-manufacturer structure is not an accident. Plaintiffs originally petitioned in February 2026 for a single industry-wide spinal cord stimulator MDL spanning all the major device makers. The Panel refused that request and instead created one docket against one manufacturer, MDL No. 3181, in June 2026. The June and July petitions are the plaintiffs' response: if the Panel will not take the industry as a unit, it may take the manufacturers one at a time, ideally in front of the judge who already has the first of them.

The three spinal cord stimulator dockets, side by side

	MDL No. 3181	MDL No. 3194	MDL No. 3195
Manufacturer	Boston Scientific	Abbott Laboratories	Nevro Corporation
Status	Created June 2026	Petition pending	Petition pending
Transferee court	C.D. Cal., Judge Josephine L. Staton	Sought: C.D. Cal.	Sought: C.D. Cal.
Actions at petition	—	15 in seven districts	17 in six districts
Petition filed	—	Summer 2026	26 June 2026
Panel argument	—	24 September 2026, Chicago	24 September 2026, Chicago
Manufacturer's position	—	Opposes	Opposes

Two points follow from the table. The first is scale: at 17 and 15 actions respectively, these are small petitions by modern standards, and the manufacturers' opposition leans on exactly that. The Panel has created dockets of comparable size, but it has also denied centralization at those numbers where informal coordination would do, and the outcome on 24 September is genuinely open.

The second is that the small numbers cut against a stay as well. The duplication a stay is meant to prevent scales with the number of parallel cases and the overlap in their pretrial work. Seventeen cases spread across six districts, litigating device-specific manufacturing and reporting theories about different implants and different clinical courses, generate less genuine duplication than the phrase "coordinated pretrial proceedings" implies.

There is also a filing-venue consequence that claimants' counsel should price now rather than later. Where an MDL exists, a transferee court will often permit direct filing into the docket, which spares plaintiffs the delay of filing in a home district and waiting for a conditional transfer order — but direct filing also means the case begins inside the MDL's pretrial programme rather than on a district judge's trial calendar. Where no MDL exists, as in Nevro cases today, the only option is to file in a district with jurisdiction and venue, and that district's judge sets the pace until the Panel says otherwise. A claimant approaching the end of the applicable Statute of Limitations does not get to wait for the Panel to rule before choosing.

Why the Panel refused an industry-wide spinal cord stimulator MDL

The February 2026 petition asked the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) to gather every spinal cord stimulator case, against every major manufacturer, into a single proceeding. The Panel declined and created one manufacturer-specific docket instead — MDL No. 3181 against Boston Scientific, assigned to the Central District of California.

That outcome follows the Panel's settled approach to multi-defendant device petitions. Section 1407 requires common questions of fact, and the Panel has repeatedly held that competing manufacturers making different products under different approval files do not share them merely because the products treat the same condition and fail in similar-sounding ways. What a Boston Scientific case and a Nevro case have in common is a category of medicine, not a defect, a warning or a regulatory submission. Centralizing them together would create a docket in which most discovery was irrelevant to most plaintiffs, and in which no defendant could be held to a common schedule without prejudice.

The refusal also explains the shape of the current petitions and, indirectly, the shape of the stay fight. Because the Panel rejected the industry-wide theory, claimants' counsel must now win centralization three times over, on smaller numbers each time, against manufacturers who can point to the Panel's own reasoning. And because each petition is smaller and more contestable than an industry-wide one would have been, the judicial-economy case for freezing individual dockets while the Panel deliberates is correspondingly weaker. A defendant asking a district judge to stay a case in deference to a proceeding that may never exist is making a conditional argument, and DiToto shows what happens when the condition looks unlikely to pay off before the case is ready for a jury.

Can a case go to trial before the JPML decides whether to centralize it?

Yes, and DiToto is the scenario in which it happens. Because Panel Rule 2.1(d) leaves pretrial jurisdiction with the transferor court, a district judge may set and keep a trial date while a Section 1407 motion is pending, may decide dispositive motions, and may enter final judgment. A case that reaches judgment before an order of transfer issues is not transferred at all; there is nothing left to coordinate.

Even after an MDL is created, an individual case can outrun it. Transfer under Section 1407 is for pretrial proceedings, and the Supreme Court held in Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26 (1998), that a transferee court cannot assign a transferred case to itself for trial. Cases that survive the MDL's common pretrial programme go back to their originating districts for trial unless the parties consent otherwise. A Bellwether Trial in the transferee court happens only in cases that were filed there or that the parties agree may be tried there.

The practical sequence in a Nevro MDL, if the Panel creates one, would therefore be: transfer of the tag-along actions by conditional transfer order; a first case management conference; leadership appointments and a Common Benefit Fund order; a Plaintiff Fact Sheet (PFS) programme and core discovery; general causation and device-specific expert work; a bellwether pool; and suggestions of remand for cases that do not resolve. A case already positioned for trial in September 2026 would be ahead of every step of that sequence.

What it means for claimants' counsel, device defendants and MDL leadership

For claimants' counsel, the order is a usable precedent for a tactical choice that is often made by default. Opposing a stay is worth doing where the case is post-pleadings, where the transferor judge has already ruled favourably on preemption or another gateway issue, and where a trial date is realistically in view. The cost of opposing is that a plaintiff who keeps a case out of an MDL also keeps it out of the MDL's resources: no common discovery to inherit, no shared expert work, no leadership to carry the cost of general causation. That trade is sensible for a mature single-plaintiff file with a strong liability record and a live trial setting. It is a poor trade for a newly filed case with thin Product Identification.

For device defendants, the order is a reminder that a centralization petition is not a pause button and that the value of a stay decays with the age of the case. A defendant that wants the benefit of coordinated proceedings across a scattered set of actions is better served by petitioning early, before individual transferor judges have invested in dispositive rulings, than by petitioning after an adverse preemption decision and then asking the same judge to stop. It is also a reminder that opposing centralization and seeking a stay pending the centralization ruling are positions in tension: a defendant telling the Panel the cases are too disparate to coordinate has a harder time telling a district judge that coordination will save that judge work.

For prospective MDL leadership, the order sharpens a question that the 24 September argument does not reach. If the Panel creates MDL No. 3195, its first structural problem will be a docket of uneven maturity — some cases at the complaint stage, at least one that has cleared preemption and is close to trial. Transferee judges handle this in familiar ways: carving out advanced cases from the common pretrial programme, suggesting early remand, or building the bellwether pool around the cases that are furthest along. Each choice has consequences for how quickly the docket produces a data point on value, and none of them is free.

For the broader spinal cord stimulator litigation, the significance is informational. Device litigation prices itself on verdicts, and there are none here yet. A single tried case in the District of Maryland in 2027, in a file that has already survived express preemption, would be the first real signal of what these claims are worth — and it would arrive, on the current trajectory, before any MDL created this week could produce one.

Frequently asked questions

What did the judge decide in DiToto v. Nevro?

On 18 September 2026, Senior U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett denied a motion to stay the case pending the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) ruling on the Nevro centralization petition, holding that a stay would not promote judicial economy because the action could go to trial within the next year and should not be prolonged further. Separately, on 21 May 2026, the same judge denied most of the defendants' motion to dismiss, allowing eight of the nine counts to proceed past federal preemption on a parallel-claim theory.

When will a court grant a motion to stay pending JPML transfer?

Most often when the case is early. Courts weigh prejudice to the non-movant, hardship to the movant and judicial economy, and the economy factor usually favours a stay because the transferee judge can decide common pretrial questions once rather than in every district. The factor reverses when the transferor court has already done the pretrial work — which is why the stay was denied in DiToto.

How long does a stay pending JPML transfer usually last?

Nominally, weeks: the Panel hears argument at bimonthly sessions and typically rules shortly afterwards. In practice the pause is longer if the petition is granted, because the case then waits through transfer, the transferee court's first case management conference and the new MDL's pretrial programme before anything case-specific resumes.

Is there a Nevro spinal cord stimulator MDL?

Not as of 22 September 2026. A petition to create MDL No. 3195, In re: Nevro Corporation Spinal Cord Stimulator Products Liability Litigation, was filed on 26 June 2026 covering 17 actions in six districts, and the Panel hears argument on it on 24 September 2026 in Chicago. Nevro opposes centralization. Until the Panel rules, Nevro cases proceed individually in their home districts.

What happens to a spinal cord stimulator case if the JPML creates an MDL?

Pending federal actions are transferred to the transferee district for coordinated pretrial proceedings, and later-filed cases follow as tag-along actions by conditional transfer order. The transferee judge appoints leadership, sets common discovery and expert programmes, and typically selects a Bellwether Trial pool. Cases that do not settle are suggested for remand to their originating districts for trial, because a transferee court cannot try a transferred case over objection.

Should a plaintiff oppose a stay pending MDL transfer?

It depends on how far the case has travelled. A mature file with a favourable gateway ruling and a trial date in view has more to lose from a pause than it gains from an MDL's shared resources. A newly filed case with undeveloped causation evidence usually gains more from common discovery and a Common Benefit Fund than it loses in delay. The analysis in DiToto is about the first category, not the second.

Does filing a JPML petition pause the deadlines in my case?

No. Under Panel Rule 2.1(d), the pendency of a Section 1407 motion or a conditional transfer order does not affect or suspend orders and pretrial proceedings in the district court, and does not limit that court's pretrial jurisdiction. Deadlines run unless the district judge stays them, and the Statute of Limitations is unaffected either way.

Can the transferee judge in an MDL try my case?

Only with the parties' consent, or if the case was filed in the transferee district to begin with. Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26 (1998), holds that a transferee court cannot assign a Section 1407 case to itself for trial, so cases that do not resolve are suggested for remand to their originating districts.