Sooner or later we knew it would happen. The law on general jurisdiction by consent has been developing very favorably – maybe even too favorably. Since Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U. S. 117 (2014), almost every appellate decision (including every state court of last resort and federal circuit court) has rejected general jurisdiction
Personal Jurisdiction
Zantac Chronicles VII & VIII − Innovator Liability and Pharmacy Liability Tossed Again

Today, we chronicle two more decisions from the Zantac MDL. Once again, kudos to this MDL transferee judge for outstanding willingness to tackle legal issues, and decide them, at an early stage of the litigation. Because we’ve gone through these issues before, here and here, we discuss these latest rulings in one post.
Chronicle …
Location May Be Key For Real Estate, But It’s Not Enough for Personal Jurisdiction

Talk to any realtor and they’ll tell you location is the key to any home search. And normally when we rail against litigation tourists, location is pretty key to us too. Plaintiffs can’t forum shop for “judicial hellholes” that have no relation to them or to the defendant. So, you’ve probably heard us say plaintiffs…
Massachusetts Sends Litigation Tourist Packing

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…
Ford Personal Jurisdiction Case Decided – In-State Plaintiffs Win; Forum Shoppers Lose

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…
Zantac Chronicles – No Innovative, or Innovator, Liability

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…
Talc MDL Court Reaffirms Dismissals Based on Lack of Personal Jurisdiction

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…
Defensive Personal Jurisdiction Discovery – Why Not?

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…
Are Defendants Entitled to Jurisdictional Discovery?

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…
Florida’s Long Arm Statute Didn’t Reach Successor Company

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…