I found the following for NY Supreme Court cases:
"Related Cases - in an effort to conserve judicial resources and avoid inconsistent rulings, the filing counsel is obligated to check off on the RJI whether a related case exists. If counsel designates the new case as related, it will be assigned to the Justice who was assigned the earlier case."
The text went on to say that if the filing party does not designate a new case as related but the responding party believes it is related to an earlier case, the responding party can move to have the new case assigned to the previous judge.
The purpose of this is to avoid judge-shopping.
Does anyone know if anything similar exists in Housing Court?