§ 8.01-267.5.Joinder and severance.

Section 8.01-267.5 works at the front end of a mass-claim case rather than the back end — it governs whether plaintiffs can join together in a single lawsuit from the start. Six or more parties may be joined as plaintiffs in one action if their claims involve common issues of fact and arise out of the same transaction or occurrence, or the same series of transactions or occurrences.

A defendant is not stuck with that joinder automatically. On a defendant’s motion, the joined claims must be severed into separate actions unless the court finds that, had the plaintiffs filed separately, their claims would have met § 8.01-267.1’s consolidation standards and would have been consolidated under § 8.01-267.3. In other words, joinder survives a severance motion only if the claims were good candidates for consolidation anyway.

If the court does order severance, the plaintiffs get sixty days from entry of the order to pay whatever filing fees are due in the separate circuit courts to keep their claims alive. And the statute protects them from a limitations trap: for each severed action, the date of the original joint filing counts as its filing date for statute-of-limitations purposes.