Case Notes

In Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston v. Ally Financial, Inc., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 140975 (D. Mass. Sep. 30, 2014), a plaintiff bank sued, among others, certain credit rating agencies in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, alleging they understated the risk of private label mortgage-backed securities sold to the plaintiff. The agencies moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction, arguing their contacts with Massachusetts were not such as to render them “essentially at home” in the state, as is required for the exercise of general or “all-purpose” jurisdiction. The court denied the motion, but shortly thereafter the United States Supreme Court held in Daimler AG v. Bauman, 134 S. Ct. 746 (2014), that “only a limited set of affiliations with a forum will render a defendant amenable to all-purpose jurisdiction there,” the paradigmatic examples being the defendant's place of incorporation or principal place of business. The defendants then moved for reconsideration of their motion to dismiss. The plaintiff opposed, and also argued that even if the court lacked personal jurisdiction, it should sever and transfer the claims against the rating agencies to the Southern District of New York, where personal jurisdiction existed.

Regarding general jurisdiction, the court first noted that the Supreme Court's opinion in Daimler made clear that whether a defendant is “essentially at home” in the forum state is not determined by the quantity of the defendant's contacts there, as “[a] corporation that operates in many places can scarcely be deemed at home in all of them.” Under this “tighter assessment of the standard,” the rating agencies could not be subject to general jurisdiction. Although they had activities in Massachusetts that generated significant revenue, they had similarly substantial contacts with dozens of other states. Moreover, the agencies were neither incorporated nor had their principal places of business in the state, and there was no indication this was an “exceptional case” under Daimler such that general jurisdiction should be extended beyond those paradigmatic forums.