Art. 593.1.Class Actions; Lis Pendens

Lis pendens is the term Louisiana law uses for a suit already pending elsewhere over the same dispute — the doctrine that keeps the same fight from proceeding in two courts at once. Article 593.1 builds a class-action-specific version of that doctrine. When two or more putative class actions asking a court to certify a class under Article 591 are filed in different Louisiana courts over the same transaction or occurrence at the same location, and the classes — if certified — would cover overlapping plaintiffs suing in the same capacities against overlapping defendants in the same capacities, the defendant can raise the objection through a declinatory exception under Article 925 and ask to have every one of those actions transferred into the district court where the transaction or occurrence happened.

Paragraph B extends the same tool to a more complicated situation: multiple related transactions or occurrences spread across different locations, still tied together by overlapping plaintiffs and defendants suing and being sued in the same capacities. There, the transfer target is not the location of any single transaction — it is the district court where the first of the related suits was filed.

Either way, the goal is the same: keep one class dispute from fragmenting into parallel, potentially conflicting proceedings in different Louisiana courthouses before any of them reaches certification.