7th Circuit Decision in Mussat v. IQVIA: Bristol-Myers, Personal Jurisdiction & Class Actions

Yesterday the Seventh Circuit did what the D.C. Circuit refrained from doing one day earlier—it weighed in on the hotly-contested question of whether the Supreme Court’s Bristol-Myers decision applies to class actions filed in federal court. Judge Wood’s unanimous panel decision in Mussat v. IQVIA, Inc. begins:

Florence Mussat, an Illinois physician doing business through a professional services corporation, received two unsolicited faxes from IQVIA, a Delaware corporation with its headquarters in Pennsylvania. These faxes failed to include the opt-out notice required by federal statute. Mussat’s corporation (to which we refer simply as Mussat) brought a putative class action in the Northern District of Illinois under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. § 227, on behalf of itself and all persons in the country who had received similar junk faxes from IQVIA in the four previous years. IQVIA moved to strike the class definition, arguing that the district court did not have personal jurisdiction over the non-Illinois members of the proposed nationwide class.

The district court granted the motion to strike, reasoning that under the Supreme Court’s decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, 137 S. Ct. 1773 (2017), not just the named plaintiff, but also the unnamed members of the class, each had to show minimum contacts between the defendant and the forum state. Because IQVIA is not subject to general jurisdiction in Illinois, the district court turned to specific jurisdiction. Applying those rules, see Walden v. Fiore, 571 U.S. 277, 283–86 (2014), it found that it had no jurisdiction over the claims of parties who, unlike Mussat, were harmed outside of Illinois. We granted Mussat’s petition to appeal from that order under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(f). We now reaffirm the Rule 23(f) order, and we hold 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. We reverse the order of the district court and remand for further proceedings.

(emphasis added).

In reaching this conclusion, Judge Wood also clarified that Rule 23(f) permitted an immediate appeal of the district court’s ruling on the motion to strike—even though that ruling did not formally grant or deny class status. She explained that “[t]he district court’s order eliminates all possibility of certifying the nationwide class Mussat sought, and so to that extent it operates as a denial of certification for one proposed class.”