§ 8.01-374.1.Consolidation or bifurcation of issues or claims in certain cases; appeal.

Asbestos litigation tends to arrive in waves — dozens or hundreds of plaintiffs suing the same manufacturers over similar exposures. Section 8.01-374.1 gives circuit courts a tool for managing that volume once a court has more than forty such personal-injury or wrongful-death cases pending at once. The judge can order a joint hearing or jury trial of whatever legal or factual questions the cases share, and can consolidate some or all of the actions outright, so the parties are not relitigating the same background facts case after case.

Consolidation is not automatic. If putting cases together would compromise any party’s right to a fair trial, the court has to decline it. Even within a consolidated proceeding, the court can split out individual claims, cross-claims, counterclaims, or discrete issues for separate or bifurcated trials, and it can use special jury interrogatories to pin down specific findings — all while preserving the right to a jury. One safeguard travels with bifurcation: a jury cannot award punitive damages to an individual plaintiff until that plaintiff has already been awarded compensatory damages, so the punishment phase never gets ahead of the harm phase.

Because these cases can stretch across years and multiple trial phases, the section also settles how appeals work. Any order made under this section is treated as interlocutory, and findings from a bifurcated trial cannot be appealed until a final order has resolved every issue in that claim or consolidated group. The section leaves out claims against railroads under Article 6 of Chapter 3 (§ 8.01-57 et seq.) and claims under the federal Employers Liability Act, and it only reaches defendants who manufactured or supplied asbestos or asbestos-containing industrial products.