Personal Jurisdiction in Mass Actions

Party Status Decides: Bristol-Myers from Rule 23 Classes to FLSA Collectives

The baseline is defendant-protective and claim-specific, and the circuits now recite it through the decisions applying it. Fischer v. Federal Express Corp., 42 F.4th 366 (3d Cir. 2022) recounts the 2017 rule: "Bristol-Myers explained that for a state court to have specific personal jurisdiction over a defendant with respect to a plaintiff’s claims, those claims must “arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts with the forum,”" and "[t]he mere fact that other plaintiffs were prescribed, obtained, and ingested Plavix in California—and allegedly sustained the same injuries as did the nonresidents—does not allow the State to assert specific jurisdiction over the nonresidents’ claims" — "other potential plaintiffs must still demonstrate personal jurisdiction over the defendant with respect to their own claims." But the decision "addressed a requirement placed on state courts by the Fourteenth Amendment," so it "did not purport to address" federal aggregate litigation and "left open questions about how the decision might impact the personal jurisdiction analysis for other procedural devices like class actions." Every extension fight since has turned on a single variable: who counts as a party.

For absent members of a Rule 23 class, the answer has been no. Mussat v. IQVIA, Inc., 953 F.3d 441 (7th Cir. 2020) held that "the principles announced in Bristol-Myers do not apply to the case of a nationwide class action filed in federal court under a federal statute." The engine is party status: "[n]onnamed class members ... may be parties for some purposes and not for others. The label ‘party’ does not indicate an absolute characteristic, but rather a conclusion about the applicability of various procedural rules that may differ based on context." Just as "absent class members are not considered parties for assessing whether the requirement of diverse citizenship under 28 U.S.C. § 1332 has been met," and are not counted for venue, "the named representatives must be able to demonstrate either general or specific personal jurisdiction, but the unnamed class members are not required to do so." Nor does Rule 4(k) smuggle the requirement back in — it "addresses how and where to serve process; it does not specify on whom process must be served," and "a district court need not have personal jurisdiction over the claims of absent class members at all."

FLSA collectives came out the other way almost everywhere, because § 216(b) calls opt-ins "party plaintiff[s]." Canaday v. The Anthem Companies, Inc., 9 F.4th 392 (6th Cir. 2021) held that "[w]here, as here, nonresident plaintiffs opt into a putative collective action under the FLSA, a court may not exercise specific personal jurisdiction over claims unrelated to the defendant’s conduct in the forum State": "The key link is party status. In an FLSA collective action, as in the mass action under California law, each opt-in plaintiff becomes a real party in interest, who must meet her burden for obtaining relief and satisfy the other requirements of party status." Fischer v. Federal Express Corp., 42 F.4th 366 (3d Cir. 2022) joined "the Sixth and Eighth Circuits," holding that where jurisdiction rests on Rule 4(k)(1)(A), "every plaintiff who seeks to opt in to the suit must demonstrate his or her claim arises out of or relates to the defendant’s minimum contacts with the forum state." Then the same court that decided Mussat completed the symmetry — Luna Vanegas v. Signet Builders, Inc., 113 F.4th 718 (7th Cir. 2024) held "that BMS requires a claim-by-claim personal jurisdiction analysis in the FLSA context," because "Section 216(b), by contrast, confers on opt-in plaintiffs the rights and duties of parties," and "[t]hat includes the duty to show personal jurisdiction." The First Circuit stands alone on the other side: Waters v. Day & Zimmermann NPS, Inc., 23 F.4th 84 (1st Cir. 2022) read Rule 4(k) as a service-of-summons rule that "nowhere suggests that Rule 4 deals with anything other than service of a summons, or that Rule 4 constrains a federal court’s power to act once a summons has been properly served, and personal jurisdiction has been established" — after that, the Fifth Amendment controls, and it "does not bar an out-of-state plaintiff from suing to enforce their rights under a federal statute in federal court" so long as the defendant has minimum contacts with the United States as a whole.

The forum arithmetic follows the aggregation device. A nationwide Rule 23 class travels on the named plaintiff’s claim alone, so certify where the representative’s claim arises or where the defendant is at home. A nationwide FLSA collective, outside the First Circuit, effectively must be filed where the employer is subject to general jurisdiction — its state of incorporation or principal place of business — or be trimmed to opt-ins whose work touched the forum; hybrid cases can split inside a single courtroom, the state-law class running nationwide while the companion collective stops at the border. Defendants should raise the objection in the first responsive filing, because the defense is waivable. And the mass-arbitration prong remains open territory — no circuit has extended Bristol-Myers to arbitral claimants — so expect defendants to press the collective-action analogy of individually named real parties in interest, and claimants to answer that arbitration rests on consent rather than territorial power.