The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday grilled lawyers in a high-profile class action about a controversial procedural tool that allows plaintiffs to appeal a class certification order by dismissing their own case.

The case, Microsoft v. Baker, is one in which the Supreme Court delayed oral arguments after Justice Antonin Scalia died last year. The issue is a critical one in class actions, where certification rulings can make or break the case. In many cases, plaintiffs attorneys have little desire to continue pursuing individual claims once they lose class certification.

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But Microsoft counsel Jeffrey Fisher, co-director of the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School, cautioned that the tactic, if approved, could be applied not just in class actions but “to any pretrial order on which the plaintiff would be willing to bet their case.”

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Although class certification could effectively wipe out the plaintiffs’ case, Fisher argued that the Supreme Court has rejected that argument as a means to appeal. In a 1978 decision called Coopers & Lybrand v. Livesay, the Supreme Court rejected the so-called death knell doctrine in finding that an appeals court should not have reviewed a decertification order.