Lucky Seven – Multi-Plaintiff Misjoinder Fails In Illinois Post-BMS

Once the Supreme Court's decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, 137 S. Ct. 1773 (2017), definitively determined that non-resident plaintiffs can't go suing non-resident defendants anywhere they want, attention turned to one of the primary types of forum-shopping gamesmanship that plaintiffs used to trap defendants in their preferred venues.

St. Louis – and thus the Eastern District of Missouri – were one of the first battle grounds, and as we celebrated here, here, and here, a jurisdiction that had previously been almost impervious to attempts to combat fraudulent misjoinder seems to be coming around. See Jinright v. Johnson & Johnson, Inc., 2017 WL 3731317, at *4-5 (E.D. Mo. Aug. 30, 2017); Covington v. Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2017 WL 3433611, at *4-5 (E.D. Mo. Aug. 10, 2017); Turner v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharma, Inc., 2017 WL 3310696, at *3 (E.D. Mo. Aug. 3, 2017); Jordan v. Bayer Corp., 2017 WL 3006993, at *4 (E.D. Mo. July 14,