Add Connecticut to the list of Zantac multi-plaintiff losses, following the Florida multidistrict litigation (our “Zantac Chronicles” series of posts, and the Delaware Supreme Court).  Only this time the several hundred Connecticut plaintiffs that were dismissed never even reached the absurd causation allegations that doomed the MDL and Delaware cases.  Rather, these Connecticut plaintiffs didn’t even have a means to establish personal jurisdiction over the non-Connecticut defendants they sued.  Bacher v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2025 WL 2463143 (Conn. Super. Aug. 22, 2025).

Bacher involved the same sort of massive misjoinder of plaintiffs that we encountered all too often before the Supreme Court put a stop to it in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, 582 U.S. 255 (2017) (“BMS”).  Here’s is how the Bacher court described plaintiffs’ blatant jurisdictional gamesmanship:

This action . . ., which is brought by ninety-nine plaintiffs, is companioned with eight other cases now pending before the court . . . .  The nine companion cases have a total of 853 plaintiffs between them.  Each of the companion cases has a single plaintiff who is a Connecticut resident, listed as the first-named plaintiff.  All of the remaining plaintiffs are out-of-state residents (collectively, the “foreign plaintiffs”).

Bacher, 2025 WL 2463143, at *2 (citations omitted).  Essentially, 844 foreign plaintiffs with no business in a Connecticut court sought, through improper joinder with nine Connecticut resident plaintiffs, to manufacture personal jurisdiction that didn’t exist.

One set of defendants sat out the jurisdictional maneuvering that led to the Bacher decision – because they had their principal place of business in Connecticut.  Id.  Since they were subject to general jurisdiction, of necessity they were jurisdictional bystanders.  Id.

As for the other moving defendants, Bacher held that BMS was controlling and precluded personal jurisdiction.  Sure, those defendants sold plenty of pills in Connecticut – but none that were consumed by the 844 foreign plaintiffs.  Sure, the defendants had various business operations in Connecticut – but none related to the production of these particular drugs.  Id. at *4.

The problem for the foreign plaintiffs was a mismatch between the defendant’s contacts with Connecticut and their own – they simply had none.

[T]he case-linkage element focuses on whether the plaintiff’s specific claim is sufficiently connected to the defendant’s forum contacts.  The case-linkage element therefore considers only those forum contacts of the defendant that have a connection to the specific claim brought by the plaintiff.  The [case-linkage] analysis reflects a profound truth:  with specific jurisdiction, the forum does not exercise regulatory power over the defendant per se, but over some aspect of the defendant’s conduct or activity − conduct or activity that takes place in or causes an effect in the forum.

Bacher, 2025 WL 2463143, at *7 (quoting Adams v. Aircraft Spruce & Specialty Co., 284 A.3d 600, 616-17 (Conn. 2022)) (emphasis original).

The foreign plaintiffs didn’t come close to “show[ing] an adequate affiliation between their claims and the [moving] defendants’ Connecticut-based activities.”  Id.  Instead, their machinations were BMS all over again, the only difference being that these plaintiffs sued multiple manufacturers – one of which (a non-movant) was a Connecticut corporation.

The facts of [BMS] bear a strong resemblance to the foreign plaintiffs’ claims against . . . in the companion cases.  As in [BMS], the companion cases involve claims by foreign plaintiffs who did not purchase a drug . . . in the forum state, did not ingest any such products in the forum state, and were not injured by those products in the forum state.  In resisting dismissal, while the plaintiffs stress the [moving] defendants’ Connecticut-based activities, they fail to demonstrate an adequate nexus between those activities and their claimed injuries.

Bacher, 2025 WL 2463143, at *9.

Also as in BMS, the number of non-resident plaintiffs dwarfed those who were from the forum state.  If anything the misjoinders in Bacher were even more transparent than those in BMS, since only one solitary Connecticut plaintiff was included, along with scores of foreign plaintiffs in each of the nine multi-plaintiff complaints in Bacher:

[I]n all of these matters, a minority of plaintiffs were residents of the state where suit was brought, thereby raising the prospect of impermissible forum shopping. . . .  Here, the numerical disparity between in-state and out-of-state plaintiffs is even more dramatic as − on a combined basis − the companion cases involve nine Connecticut residents (one in each case) and 844 foreign plaintiffs. Thus, the inference of improper forum shopping is even more pronounced.

Id. at *10.  That was in stark contrast to the situation in the post-BMS decision in Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Judicial District Court, 592 U.S. 351 (2021), which Bacher recognized did not involve forum-shopping non-resident plaintiffs.  2025 WL 2463143, at *11 (in Ford Motor “The accident happened in the state where suit was brought.  The victim was one of the state’s residents.”) (emphasis original).

Thus, the hundreds of foreign plaintiffs in Bacher were interlopers who did not belong in any Connecticut court.  Their presence was offensive to constitutional principles of federalism.  Id. at *10.  “Issues of federalism are implicated by a Connecticut court entertaining the foreign plaintiffs’ claims in the companion cases because it denies the foreign defendants’ home states the opportunity to adjudicate their claims.” Id.  Given their complete lack of Connecticut contacts, “Connecticut does not have a significant interest in providing a judicial forum to the foreign plaintiffs.”  Id.

Thus, the foreign plaintiffs, while “highlight[ing] the [moving] defendants’ overall activities in the state of Connecticut” utterly failed to “demonstrate[e] either that [their] claimed injuries arose directly from these activities, or that these activities relate sufficiently to the plaintiffs’ specific claims of injury.”  Bacher, 2025 WL 2463143, at *12.  Allowing them to stay in Connecticut, simply because they had included a Connecticut plaintiff and a Connecticut defendant in their complaints, was “a view of specific jurisdiction that dissolves, impermissibly, into general jurisdiction.”  Id.

And so, another attempt to aggregate medically ludicrous Zantac cancer claims in some forum that plaintiffs’ counsel view as potentially favorable has come to an end.  Strike three?