Group Pleading And Personal Jurisdiction: Strengthening The Defense In Mass Tort Cases

• Jurisdiction: United States,Federal
• Law Firm: Butler Snow LLP
• Subject Matter: Consumer Protection, Product Liability & Safety
• Author: Mr P. Thomas Distanislao
• Published date: 19 May 2023

There are few rights more important to civil defendants'particularly corporate entities'than personal jurisdiction, which restricts "'judicial power not as a matter of sovereignty, but as a matter of individual liberty,'" because "due process protects the individual's right to be subject only to lawful power." Id. (quoting Ins. Corp. of Ireland v. Campagnie des Bauxites de Guinee, 456 U.S. 694, 702 (1982)). In light of the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Daimler AG v. Bauman Goodyear Dunlop Tires Ops., 571 U.S. 117 (2014)., S.A. v. Brown, 564 U.S. 915 (2011)., Walden v. Fiore, 571 U.S. 277 (2014)., and BNSF Railway Co. v. Tyrell, 137 S. Ct. 1549 (2017)., among others, this once tepid defense now has significant teeth.

When analyzing whether a plaintiff has sufficiently pleaded that the exercise of personal jurisdiction over a particular defendant is proper, courts must assess each defendant's contacts with the forum separately. Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 790 (1984); accord Rush v. Savchuk, 444 U.S. 320, 332 (1980) ("The requirements of International Shoe . . . must be met as to each defendant over whom a state court exercises jurisdiction.") As the Supreme Court has emphasized, this is "a forum-by-forum, sovereign-by-sovereign analysis" that has to be satisfied for each claim against each defendant. J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro, 564 U.S. 873, 884 (2011). In most cases, answering that question is a straightforward analysis: the plaintiff simply has to plead enough facts to tie the defendant to the forum State.

But in products liability cases against multiple parties'particularly in the mass tort or environmental context'this approach is often muddled by the sheer number of defendants being sued. More often than not, plaintiffs in those cases tend to err on the side of cursory jurisdictional allegations against each defendant, adopting a "group" or "aggregated" pleading approach where they lump all of the defendants together in a single allegation connected by multiple "and/or" clauses.

At first blush, this appears to be patently insufficient. After all, how can a court conduct a defendant-by-defendant analysis when all of the allegations are generic and indistinguishable among a large number of defendants? More to the point, how can defendants meaningfully challenge the court's exercise of personal jurisdiction if boilerplate allegations are sufficient?

Nevertheless, some courts have found these types of pleadings sufficient to warrant jurisdictional discovery, if not the full exercise of personal jurisdiction altogether. A recent example comes from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina, which reached that exact conclusion in its 2022 decision in Weaver v. 3M Co. No. 5:22-CV-116-FL, 2022 WL 17744491 (E.D.N.C. Dec. 16, 2022).

This approach is flawed for at least two reasons. For starters, it is a misapplication of governing principles of the personal jurisdiction analysis, effectively yielding any independent duty of the courts in protecting defendants' due process rights to whatever allegations are in the plaintiff's complaint, no matter how paltry they may be.

Moreover, this approach is an outlier in the national trend is favoring similarly deficient pleadings and finding they are not enough to satisfy the plaintiff's burden of establishing personal jurisdiction.

In contrasting these approaches'and considering how courts ought to look at group pleadings generally for this purpose'this article first summarizes the court's decision in Weaver. Then it highlights that decision's analytical...