Legal Definitions - undue multiplicity of claims

Undue Multiplicity of Claims refers to a situation where a party brings an excessive or inappropriate number of separate legal claims, particularly when those claims could or should have been combined into fewer, more comprehensive legal actions. This practice can unnecessarily burden the court system, harass the opposing party, and lead to inefficient use of legal resources. Courts often have rules to prevent such situations, encouraging parties to consolidate related issues into a single lawsuit.

Here are some examples to illustrate this concept:

• Consumer Dispute: Imagine a customer who purchased five different faulty appliances from the same electronics store over a six-month period. Instead of filing one lawsuit against the store to address all five defective items, the customer files five separate small claims lawsuits, one for each appliance. This would be considered an undue multiplicity of claims because all the disputes involve the same parties, the same type of issue (defective products), and could be efficiently resolved in a single legal action.

• Contractual Payments: A freelance designer completes several distinct projects for a single client under a master service agreement. The client consistently delays payment for each project. Rather than waiting to file one comprehensive lawsuit for all outstanding payments once the pattern becomes clear, or filing a single breach of contract claim encompassing the repeated non-payments, the designer files a separate lawsuit every time a payment is missed. This creates an undue multiplicity of claims, as all the payment disputes arise from the same ongoing business relationship and could be consolidated into a single, more efficient legal proceeding.

• Property Damage: A homeowner experiences recurring damage to their property due to a neighbor's poorly maintained drainage system, leading to flooding in their yard after every heavy rain. Over the course of a year, the homeowner files a new lawsuit against the neighbor each time their yard floods, seeking compensation for the specific damage from that single incident. This constitutes an undue multiplicity of claims. A more appropriate approach would be to file one lawsuit seeking an injunction to fix the drainage problem and claim damages for all past and anticipated future harm, rather than initiating multiple separate actions for each individual flooding event.