Aaron Hernandez’s daughter’s $20M NFL suit at stake

• LISTENING INTENTLY: Aaron Hernandez listens during a hearing in Suffolk Superior Court, Tuesday, December 20, 2016. Staff photo by Angela Rowlings.

• Former New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez appears in Suffolk Superior Court for a pretrial hearing before Judge Jeffrey Locke, on Tuesday, December 27, 2016 in Boston.

• Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, left, stands with his attorney and responds to a question from the judge during a hearing on defense motions in advance of jury selection beginning later this month at at Suffolk Superior Court, Monday, Feb. 6, 2017, in Boston. Hernandez is scheduled to stand trial for the July 2012 killings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia)

• Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez attends proceedings during a hearing on defense motions in advance of jury selection beginning later this month at at Suffolk Superior Court Monday, Feb. 6, 2017, in Boston. Hernandez is scheduled to stand trial for the July 2012 killings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado who he encountered in a Boston nightclub. He already is serving a life sentence in the 2013 killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd. (AP Photo/Stephan Savoia, Pool)

• Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez looks back from the defense table at Hernandez’s double murder trial at Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday, March 8, 2017. Hernandez is standing trial for the July 2012 killings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado who he encountered in a Boston nightclub. The former NFL player is already serving a life sentence in the 2013 killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd. Staff Photo by Nancy Lane

• D.J. Hernandez, brother of Former New England Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez, looks back during his brother’s murder trial, Friday, Jan. 30, 2015, in Fall River, Mass. Aaron Hernandez is charged with killing semiprofessional football player Odin Lloyd, 27, in June 2013. (AP Photo/The Boston Herald, Ted Fitzgerald, Pool)

• (040517 Boston, MA) Former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez listens during testimony at Hernandez’s double murder trial at Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday, April 5, 2017. Hernandez is standing trial for the July 2012 killings of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado who he encountered in a Boston nightclub. The former NFL player is already serving a life sentence in the 2013 killing of semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd. Staff Photo by Nancy Lane

• AVOIDING CLASS-ACTION: Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez and her daughter, above, are fighting to keep their lawsuit about Aaron Hernandez separate from a class-action suit.

A special panel of federal judges meeting in Miami, Fla., next month will take up the struggle by Aaron Hernandez’s little girl to keep her $20 million lawsuit against the National Football League and others separate from a mountain of player concussion claims stacking up under one class-action umbrella.

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation will consider a request by lawyers for Hernandez’s fiancee, Shayanna Jenkins Hernandez, and the former couple’s 5-year-old daughter to vacate the panel’s November order that threatens to remove their loss-of-parental-consortium suit from Norfolk Superior Court in Dedham and merge it with concussion-specific claims lumped together at a federal court in Pennsylvania.

The panel stipulated it will not permit oral arguments when its members convene in Miami Jan. 25; however, they might schedule a second hearing if the judges find the Hernandez case unique and compelling.

In a memorandum supporting their Dec. 12 motion to vacate the panel’s transfer order, the child’s lawyers contend the loss of her father’s love and companionship “concerns quite different issues from those centralized” in Pennsylvania because her case is not about “alleged NFL-football-related injury. … Here, there is nothing to be gained by transferring this unrelated case into a settlement-focused MDL (multidistrict litigation). … Therefore, it does not further the purposes of centralization to move a proverbial apple into an orange basket.”

Hernandez, 27, was posthumously diagnosed with advanced chronic traumatic encephalopathy of the brain following his jailhouse suicide, which came just days after he was acquitted of shooting two strangers to death at a South End traffic light. The former New England Patriots tight end was still serving life, however, for the 2013 murder of semi-pro footballer Odin L. Lloyd.

That conviction was vacated after his death because the case was under appeal.

The child’s attorneys assert in her complaint that her father lived a “chaotic and horrendous existence” as a result of being neurologically compromised by playing football for more than two decades. They allege the child was deprived of her father’s love, affection and companionship while he was alive because his career made him sick.

The child, they argue, “had no reasonable ability to discern that the symptoms witnessed in Aaron were linked to latent brain disease, and also to exposure to repetitive blows to the head suffered during football play until after Aaron’s death.”

The suit accuses the NFL and football helmet manufacturer Riddell of civil conspiracy, negligence and fraudulent concealment of long-term concussion dangers.