An Illinois intermediate appeals court recently affirmed the Cook County trial court by holding that Illinois courts could exercise personal jurisdiction over a Texas company that overhauled an accident aircraft's engine in Texas seven years before the accident took place. Schaefer v. Synergy Flight Ctr., LLC, No. 1-18-1779, 2019 Ill. App. LEXIS 705 (Ill. Ct. App. Aug. 26, 2019). While the parties agreed that the defendant was not subject to general, or allpurpose, jurisdiction, they disputed whether specific personal jurisdiction existed over the foreign company. Despite the defendant's apparent lack of forum-related conduct, the court held that it did.

The court correctly noted in its analysis that specific jurisdiction requires a defendant's purposeful direction of business activities at the forum state, and that the cause of action must relate to the defendant's conduct with the forum state. Strangely, the court then proceeded to cite the percentage of revenue the company derived from activity in Illinois―a fact that is usually cited to support a general jurisdiction argument (at less than 2.5%, this percentage of revenue earned in the forum state still was not enough to confer general jurisdiction under Daimler and its recent U.S. Supreme Court progeny). The defendant's business relationships with six Illinois entities factored heavily in the Schaefer court's reasoning, although the court did not expressly say that any of those entities were involved in the accident at issue. The court placed equal significance on the fact that the defendant's alleged negligence caused the crash of an Illinois based plane and deaths in Illinois, but did not explain how the maintenance of an aircraft engine in another state constitutes forum-based conduct sufficient to support the exercise of specific jurisdiction in Illinois.

This decision, based as it is on specific jurisdiction, exemplifies a typical misunderstanding defendants may encounter when contesting personal jurisdiction: that jurisdictional predicates completely outside the control of the defendant still may be cited in support of a court's exercise of specific jurisdiction over that defendant. Also, plaintiffs (and, as Schaefer demonstrates, even courts) often blur the line between general and specific jurisdiction in an effort to bootstrap every potentially relevant fact into the jurisdictional analysis. Whether done intentionally or not, it is important to recognize this tactic and stop it before it contaminates the jurisdictional inquiry.

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