Leadership orders are the least interesting documents in a coordinated proceeding, which is precisely why they are worth reading. They are drafted by the counsel who will benefit from them, submitted as proposed orders, and signed with minimal alteration. The template is stable across jurisdictions and decades. Co-leads direct strategy, a liaison handles the court, a steering committee does the work, and everyone else stands down.

Case Management Order No. 1 in In re: ChatGPT Product Liability Cases, JCCP No. 5431, entered August 4, 2026, is that document. It is also, on page five, something less usual.

What the order does

The coordination is assigned for all purposes to Judge Ethan P. Schulman in Department 304 of San Francisco County Superior Court. CMO No. 1 appoints four plaintiffs’ co-lead counsel: Matthew P. Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center, Patrick Ntchobo of Edelson PC, Lesley E. Weaver of Stranch, Jennings & Garvey, and Rachel Lanier of The Lanier Law Firm. C. Brooks Cutter of Cutter Law serves as liaison counsel. Five attorneys seat the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, with a sixth to be designated later by co-leads subject to court approval.

The authority grant is conventional and broad. Co-leads determine the plaintiffs’ position on all pretrial matters, coordinate discovery and discovery protocols, lead motion briefing, select trial teams and bellwether cases, negotiate on common issues, establish subcommittees, and move for a common benefit order and common cost fund. The order also builds in the usual enforcement mechanism: a leadership position is contingent on continued commitment and on paying assessments, and an attorney who abandons assigned responsibilities forfeits any right to participate in the common benefit fund.

Two provisions run the other way, and both are standard. Each plaintiff’s individually retained counsel remains responsible for the prosecution, trial, and resolution of that plaintiff’s own action. And each plaintiff retains the exclusive right to accept or reject settlement of their individual claims; co-lead settlement authority reaches common or coordinated issues only.

The line on page five

Section I.B contains the sentence every leadership order contains. No pleadings or other papers shall be filed, and no discovery conducted, concerning liability on behalf of plaintiffs except as prepared, authorized, or directed by co-lead counsel.

Beneath it, running into the margin and across the subsection heading that follows, Schulman wrote in longhand that nothing in the section limits the right of any self-represented plaintiff to file papers concerning issues unique to their individual case.

That is not a drafting artifact. Plaintiffs’ counsel submitted a proposed order; the judge added a limitation on their authority before signing it. The mechanism matters as much as the substance. An interlineation is the record of a court declining to take a submitted document as offered.

Why it was needed

On July 21, 2026, the court entered an order coordinating an add-on case into JCCP 5431. The plaintiff in that action, San Francisco Case No. CGC-26-636564, appears on the court’s party list as Pro Per. He is one of eight plaintiff cases currently listed in the proceeding, alongside Raine, Lacey, and five others, and the only one without counsel of record.

Two weeks later, the leadership order arrived with a carve-out for exactly that circumstance. The sequence is not coincidental, and it explains a second provision that would otherwise read as boilerplate. Among liaison counsel’s enumerated duties, subsection (k) requires coordinating communications with any pro se plaintiff in the proceeding, including ensuring that self-represented plaintiffs receive all filings, notices, and case communications on the same basis as represented parties, and have access to shared discovery materials and case resources, subject to any protective order.

Read together, the two provisions do something a leadership order does not usually attempt. They assign an affirmative duty to plaintiffs’ leadership to keep an unrepresented party inside the information flow of the coordinated proceeding, and they preserve that party’s ability to act on it.

The structural problem this addresses

Coordinated proceedings are built on the premise that plaintiffs are represented and that their counsel can be organized. Leadership structures exist to prevent duplicative filings, and the prohibition on unauthorized liability papers is the operative tool. Applied without qualification to a self-represented plaintiff, that prohibition produces an uncomfortable result: a party whose case has been pulled into a coordinated proceeding, who has no counsel to be represented by in the leadership structure, and who is barred from filing on his own behalf.

The conventional answer is that the pro se plaintiff should obtain counsel. In this instance he reportedly tried. Whatever the reason, the practical position of an unrepresented plaintiff inside a mass tort coordination is not well addressed by the standard template, and CMO No. 1 is one court’s attempt to address it on the fly.

Whether the carve-out proves workable is a separate question. The line between issues unique to an individual case and issues common to the proceeding is exactly the line coordination exists to police, and a self-represented plaintiff is not well positioned to draw it. Leadership now has an interest in a narrow reading and the pro se plaintiff has an interest in a broad one. That tension will surface in a filing at some point, and how Schulman resolves it will say more than the interlineation does.

The other line worth noting

Liaison counsel’s duty (j) directs coordination with leadership in the federal multidistrict litigation covering the same subject matter, to the extent practical and without prejudice to plaintiffs’ rights under California law in state court.

There is presently no federal MDL covering AI wrongful death claims. The federal cases in this space, including the Tumbler Ridge suits in the Northern District of California and the FSU shooting case in the Northern District of Florida, are proceeding separately. The order contemplates one anyway, and the qualifying language about California rights in state court reads like counsel protecting a forum advantage against a coordination they expect to be asked to join.

What to watch

The further case management conference is set for September 23, 2026, following the initial conference held July 24. Three things are worth tracking from here.

First, whether the pro se plaintiff files anything, and whether leadership objects. That is the test of the interlineation.

Second, the sixth steering committee seat. Held-open seats in coordinated proceedings are usually reserved for a firm expected to bring inventory, and the designation will indicate which way leadership expects the case count to grow.

Third, whether a federal MDL petition follows. Duty (j) suggests plaintiffs’ leadership anticipates one. The composition of state and federal leadership rarely overlaps cleanly, and the firms holding four of the eight coordinated cases in San Francisco have an obvious interest in how that resolves.

The claims described in this article are allegations by the parties and have not been adjudicated. Case status is current as of publication and drawn from the court’s register of actions and party list in JCCP No. 5431, Case No. CJC-25-005431.