What happens when a plaintiff from Kentucky sues a New York company in Massachusetts? The case gets tossed for lack of personal jurisdiction. That is exactly what happened in Kingston v. Angiodynamics, Inc., 2021 WL 3022320 (D. Mass. Jul. 16, 2021). It is what should have happened in Hammons v. Ethicon, Inc., 240
We’ve blogged about the United States Supreme Court’s pending personal jurisdiction cases before. Well, they pend no longer. Yesterday the Court unanimously (with a couple of concurrences) ruled that resident plaintiffs injured by products originally manufactured and sold elsewhere could sue a nationwide company like Ford – that “purposefully avail[ed] itself of the privilege
Several significant decisions have recently emerged from the In re Zantac MDL, No. 2924. We gave you a “bare bones” rundown of the first four of them right away. But now we’d like to discuss them in more detail.
We start with In re Zantac (Ranitidine) Products Liability Litigation, ___ F. Supp.3d
Last July, Bexis blogged about two inconsistent personal jurisdiction rulings in talc litigation. Those rulings created a personal jurisdiction split between a Missouri court and the talc MDL court on whether non-Missouri plaintiffs could sue a non-Missouri defendant in Missouri even if those plaintiffs did not use the product or suffer an injury in
Sometimes it can be easy to believe that a random thought can conjure a real-life response. Such as when you imagine yourself taking a vacation to someplace warm and tropical (not at all brought on by mid-January temps in the Mid-Atlantic) and suddenly every other commercial you see has a palm tree, a hammock, and
In our personal jurisdiction posts, we’ve generally taken a dim view of plaintiffs who attempt to oppose Rule 12(b)(2) dismissal motions with requests for jurisdictional discovery. Both our experience and our perspective leads us to view such requests as overwhelmingly likely to be fishing expeditions, designed more to delay and to increase the expense of
This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
Talking about being “at home” has a new meaning this year and no doubt we all would really enjoy some changed scenery about now. This blogger used the Thanksgiving holiday weekend to merr-ify her surroundings. Allowing decorating for the holidays to spill over into
It’s not exactly Groundhog Day, but we are sticking with personal jurisdiction. Today we’re sliding two states over to Missouri. Gateway to the West. Home to Maya Angelou, Mark Twain, Dick Van Dyke, and John Goodman. Birthplace of the waffle cone and home to the largest beer producing plant in the country. Unlike Indiana, Missouri
We’ve all seen lists of so-called hellhole jurisdictions — court systems that treat corporate defendants brutally. What about a list of the places where corporations get a fair shake? Indiana would be on that list. Jurors in the Hoosier State don’t casually toss around multimillion dollar verdicts. Further, both federal and state judges in Indiana
As we write this, there is great uncertainty in the country. The intersection of state and federal law is a focus, as is the possibility that one or more of the many recent challenges to how states count votes for the presidential election will end up in the Supreme Court. The tension is palpable, in