The Pennsylvania Supreme Court entered an emergency COVID-19-related order on March 24, 2020 – copy here – that should be of interest to our clients who engage in removal before service (so-called “snap removal”). As we reported at the time, the Third Circuit upheld removal before service in Encompass Insurance Co. v. Stone Mansion
One way to remove a case to federal court that we haven’t discussed much is where the defendant is either a “federal officer” (not terribly relevant to our line of work), or else is a “person acting under that officer . . . for or relating to any act under color of such office.” 28
It is not often that we report on the creation of something new in the removal/remand area (ten years ago as to removal before service was one such moment), but today that is what we’re doing.
The decision is Markham v. Ethicon, Inc., C.A. No. 19-5464, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2020 WL ______, slip
As we’ve gleefully chronicled, recently the tide has been running distinctly in our favor on defendants being permitted to remove cases to federal court before plaintiffs – every one of them a non-resident litigation tourist – can serve a so-called “forum defendant” – that is, a completely diverse defendant that is also a resident
They are often called “snap removals” or “wrinkle removals.” They refer to cases removed to federal court before a forum defendant is served, which is one way to comply with the forum defendant rule in 28 U.S.C. § 1441(b)(2). That statute says that a civil action otherwise removable on diversity jurisdiction may not be removed
We have written a number of times on CAFA, the Class Action Fairness Act. The decisions and subjects we have covered can be pretty technical and even numerical. After all, one of the central provisions of CAFA has a number in it: a “mass action” is one “in which monetary relied claims of 100
Last year was a banner year for removal before service, with both the Second and Third Circuits weighing in to support application of the removal statute according its terms, thereby giving their blessing to the so-called “snap” or “wrinkle” removal practice that this Blog has advocated for a decade. See Gibbons v. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.
We’ve blogged before about the substantive (preemption) and procedural (removal) aspects of the Eliquis MDL – both of which the defense seemed to be winning. However, we cautioned in our 2018 “Best Of” post that these favorable decisions “still face[d] an appeal.”
No longer. The appeal has been decided, and the plaintiff’s losing streak continues.
Our recent post on “wrinkle removal” – that is, removal before service – case got us thinking. The opinion discussed in that post, Dechow v. Gilead Sciences, Inc., ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2019 WL 5176243 (C.D. Cal. Feb. 8, 2019), was out of California, in the Ninth Circuit. That didn’t keep Dechow from citing
Earlier this month we explained that a “wrinkle removal,” was one that capitalized on a “wrinkle” in the language of 28 U.S.C. § 1441(b)(2), which provides that a case cannot be removed on the basis of diversity if any “properly joined and served” defendant is a citizen of the forum state. But if the forum