A class action lawsuit is a single lawsuit representing a large group of people, but multidistrict litigation, or MDL, involves multiple lawsuits consolidated into a single court for pretrial purposes, such as discovery. Both class actions and multidistrict litigations are similar in that they both deal with multiple parties sharing similar issues, but they can have very different resolutions. In a class action, the settlement or judgment awarded in the single case is divided among all plaintiffs equally. With MDL, each case is still tried separately, so certain claims may be more successful than others.