[boringg]

Potentially but it's also a waste of our judicial system resources to have 12 identical cases going at the same time. However if you like paying for legal admin fees on both side its a great way to make sure lawyers get paid.

[tedivm]

There are other ways to accomplish this other than bankruptcy. Judges combine cases together all the time.

[somenits]

That's not true. Judges can't just take cases from different districts and different states, different court systems altogether, and consolidate them. Plaintiffs can choose to file a class action, but you can't force them into one. If all the cases are in federal court, you can kind of consolidate into an MDL (multi-district litigation), but that just consolidates certain pre-trial procedures. Unless they settle, the cases still get sent back out to the districts they came from for resolution by the original judges and separate juries.

Bankruptcy is one way around this.

[naasking]

There's something to be said for making this as painful and costly as possible for J&J.