Philadelphia County Court
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court has a chance to end a popular strategy among lawyers who, for now, are able to use Pennsylvania courts to seek massive verdicts for clients who don't even live there.
A 2023 decision by the Supreme Court gave approval to Pennsylvania's registration statute, which drags out-of-state companies into the state's courts if they do something as simple as sell their products there. And the plaintiff need not be a Pennsylvanian either.
One result is a mass-tort program in Philadelphia that has historically attracted plaintiff lawyers and their out-of-state clients chasing the type of blockbuster awards juries there have routinely given out. About 90% of plaintiffs suing Syngenta over an herbicide in Philadelphia are from out-of-state.
As Illinois lawmakers try to push through a law that would similarly open its courts for business, a company facing more than 1,100 lawsuits in Philadelphia wants the U.S. Supreme Court to stop what critics call forum-shopping by plaintiff lawyers. Syngenta, headquartered in North Carolina, has asked the Supreme Court to hear its arguments.
And it received support from business and legal reforms groups on June 20, when the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, the state Chamber of Business, the American Property Casualty Insurance Association and the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania filed an amicus brief urging the court to decide issues not there when it issued its 2023 decision, known as Mallory.
"The Registration Statute, of course, existed pre-Mallory," the brief says. "But with the imprimatur of Mallory - together with the soaring trend of nuclear verdicts in the Commonwealth and the high burden attendant to venue transfers... - widespread abuse of the Statute for forum shoppers who prefer plaintiff-friendly Commonwealth courts is all but inevitable.
"Businesses will now think twice about whether to conduct business in the Commonwealth, at significant cost to the state's financial well-being."
In the 2023 decision in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway, the high court brushed aside concerns that Pennsylvania's law had made courts in Philadelphia, in particular, a popular destination for so-called "litigation tourism," or out-of-state legal claims against companies not based in Pennsylvania.
Juries in Philadelphia sometimes welcome the chance to hammer corporate defendants. For example, a jury hearing claims the weedkiller Roundup awarded $2.2 billion, and another jury gave $725 million in a case against Exxon Mobil over alleged benzene exposure.
Juries in Pennsylvania gave out the third-most of any state last year - $3.4 billion - said a study by Marathon Strategies.
But there are still unanswered questions from the Mallory decision, Syngenta says. Though the company did have to register with Pennsylvania to sell its herbicide Paraquat (which allegedly causes Parkinson's disease), it owns no property in the state and only employees about 15 people in it who are mostly sales representatives.
The company says the Registration Statute violates the Dormant Commerce Clause, which limits how states can regulate commerce.
The amicus brief by PCCJR and others says the statute exposes businesses to "geographically untethered and potentially crippling suits brought by out-of-state plaintiffs, tried by remote Pennsylvania trial courts and heard by juries having no substantive connection to the litigation."
It adds, "Large foreign corporations will be hard-pressed to shoulder the burden, which will likely be borne even more heavily by small businesses. Allowing Pennsylvania to force out-of-state defendants into its courts in this manner is an ongoing structural constitutional violation, from which a defendant has no remedy."
Likewise, Republicans in Illinois have said a proposed new law that is similar to Pennsylvania's and was rushed through by Democrats is unconstitutional, filing a lawsuit to block it before Gov. J.B. Pritzker has decided whether to sign or veto it.
To this point, Illinois courts have operated under different rules, under which Illinois courts are designated as "specific personal jurisdiction" legal venues. Under such a system, plaintiffs attempting to sue companies in Illinois state courts generally must prove that the company had sufficient ties to the state or that an incident that caused the alleged harms happened in the state.
The specific jurisdiction rules, which historically have controlled in most U.S. states, have served to limit the legal exposure of companies that operate across state lines, limiting the ability of trial lawyers to "forum shop" by choosing to file lawsuits in court systems considered to be more friendly to their pursuit of massive verdicts and settlements, often worth many millions or even billions of dollars.
The Supreme Court's action on the Syngenta case would certainly have an impact on Illinois, as it would in Georgia, Iowa, Kansas and Minnesota. Those four states also have laws allowing their courts to assert jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants that registered to do business there.
"Until this Court weighs in on this vital issue, uncertainty and inconsistency will only intensify," the PCCJR brief says.
Editor’s note: Jonathan Bilyk contributed to this report.
