LCJ AMICUS BRIEF IN ABDULLAH V. MEAD JOHNSON & CO. LLC, BEFORE THE US COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT, ON FRAUDULENT JOINDER

LCJ AMICUS BRIEF IN ABDULLAH V. MEAD JOHNSON & CO. LLC, IN THE US COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT

LCJ’s amicus brief urges the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to affirm the decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, which held that federal diversity jurisdiction survives the joinder of non-diverse defendants against whom a plaintiff has no good faith intent to pursue a claim.

The brief was prepared for LCJ by Kaspar Stoffelmayr of Bartlit Beck LLP. Mr. Stoffelmayr has broad experience in mass tort, product liability, and class action defense, as well as in prosecuting and defending commercial disputes. He is regarded as one of the leading product liability and mass tort lawyers in the country.

A plaintiff’s fraudulent joinder of a local defendant without any intention to pursue the claim serves only one purpose: to prevent a federal court from providing a neutral forum to hear the actual dispute, which is between the plaintiff and other defendants from out of state. If avoiding federal court was so easy, then federal diversity jurisdiction would be unavailable in virtually every case where it matters the most –- when a plaintiff’s lawyers have concluded that they enjoy an improper advantage in state court.

Fraudulent joinder is not just at odds with the authority of the federal courts and the statutory promise to provide out-of-state litigants with an unbiased forum. It also imposes significant and unfair burdens on the local defendants pulled unwillingly into litigation only to assist a plaintiff’s litigation strategy against defendants that the plaintiff really wants to sue.

The law does not require courts to tolerate any of this. The standard that the district court applied in this case – requiring a “good faith intent to pursue a claim against a non-diverse defendant” – is well supported in the case law, administrable, and flexible enough to preserve the federal courts’ role as a forum for interstate disputes in which all parties can have confidence. Please click here to read the brief.