United States District Court, D. Colorado
ROLANDO VEGA, individually and on behalf of others similarly situated, Plaintiff,
v.
CRAFTWORKS RESTAURANTS & BREWERIES GROUP, INC., Defendant.
OPINION AND ORDER DENYING MOTION TO DISMISS OR TO
TRANSFER
Marcia
S. Krieger United States District Judge
THIS
MATTER comes before the Court pursuant to the
Defendant's (“Craftworks”) Motion to Dismiss
for Lack of Jurisdiction or to Transfer Venue (#
22), Mr. Vega's response (#
26), and Craftworks' reply (#
30).
FACTS
According
to Mr. Vega's Complaint (# 1), Mr. Vega
was employed as an Assistant Manager at Craftworks'
Gordon Biersch Brewery (“GBB”) restaurant located
in New Orleans, Louisiana. Craftworks classified GBB
Assistant Managers as executive employees, exempt from the
Fair Labor Standards Act's (“FLSA”) overtime
requirements. However, Mr. Vega alleges that, due to
inadequate labor budgeting, Craftworks forced Assistant
Managers at the New Orleans GBB - and indeed, at other GBB
locations as well - to routinely perform non-exempt duties,
such that their “primary duty” was no longer
managerial. As a result, Mr. Vega alleges that Craftworks
forfeited any FLSA exemption that might apply to Assistant
Managers at GBB and that Craftworks was therefore obligated
to pay them overtime wages as required by the FLSA. Mr. Vega
brings a single claim for violation of the FLSA's
overtime requirements, 29 U.S.C. § 207. Moreover, Mr.
Vega requests to bring his claim as a collective action under
29 U.S.C. § 216(b), allowing all GBB Assistant Managers
(or others bearing similar job titles or job duties) to opt
into this action as co-plaintiffs.
Craftworks
moves (# 22) to: (i) dismiss Mr. Vega's
suit for lack of personal jurisdiction pursuant to
Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(2), on the grounds that Craftworks does
not have a sufficient jurisdictional presence in Colorado;
(ii) to dismiss Mr. Vega's claim for improper venue under
Rule 12(b)(3) and 28 U.S.C. § 1391, in that Colorado is
not a statutorily-approved venue for a suit involving these
parties and allegations; and (iii) if the Court is not
otherwise inclined to dismiss Mr. Vega's claims, to
transfer this action to the Eastern District of Louisiana for
the convenience of parties and the ease of access to
evidence.
ANALYSIS
A.
Personal Jurisdiction
The
party asserting the existence of personal jurisdiction -
here, Mr. Vega - has the burden of establishing its
existence. Behagen v. Amateur Basketball Assn., 744
F.2d 731, 733 (10th Cir. 1984). Faced with a
motion challenging the existence of personal jurisdiction,
the court may elect to conduct an evidentiary hearing and
conclusively resolve the question; alternatively, the court
may elect to resolve the matter on the strength of affidavits
and other written materials, deferring the conclusive
resolution of the jurisdictional question to the time of
trial. If the court resolves the matter on written
submissions, it requires the plaintiff to make only a
prima facie showing of personal jurisdiction now.
Niemi v. Lasshofer, 770 F.3d 1331, 1347
(10th Cir. 2014). If the court requires only a
prima facie showing, it takes any well-pled facts
alleged in the Complaint as true and construes any factual
disputes in the parties' affidavits in favor of the
plaintiff. Dudnikov v. Chalk & Vermillion Fine Arts,
Inc., 514 F.3d 1063, 1070 (10th Cir. 2008).
For
purposes of personal jurisdiction, the court conducts two
inquiries. First, it ascertains whether it has “general
jurisdiction” over a defendant, such that the court can
hear any controversy involving that defendant. The
“paradigm forum for the exercise of general
jurisdiction is the individual's domicile; for a
corporation, it is an equivalent place, one in which the
corporation is fairly regarded as at home.”
Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of
California, 137 S.Ct. 1773, 1780 (2017). Except in
exceptional cases (where the corporation is “so heavily
engaged in activity” in the forum state as to render it
“essentially at home” there), the fora in which
general jurisdiction over a corporate defendant can be
exercised are those where the entity is incorporated or where
it maintains its principal place of business. BNSF Ry.
Co. v. Tyrell, 137 S.Ct. 1549, 1558 (2017).
Here,
the parties agree that Craftworks was incorporated in
Delaware. But they disagree as to the location of
Craftworks' principal place of business. It is undisputed
that, at the time of the operative events in Mr. Vega's
Complaint, Craftworks' principal place of business was in
Broomfield, Colorado. But Craftworks asserts that, effective
November 1, 2018, it merged with another entity and relocated
its corporate headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee. The
parties have significant factual disputes as to whether and
when Craftworks moved its headquarters from Colorado to
Tennessee - Mr. Vega points out that various governmental
registries in both Colorado and Tennessee currently report
Craftworks' headquarters as being in Colorado, among
other things.
The
Court need not resolve these disputes. Craftworks assumes but
cites no authority for the proposition that the
jurisdictional question is determined based on the
citizenship of a defendant at the precise moment that a case
is commenced. That contention does not appear to be correct.
Instead, the temporal focus is when the alleged events
occurred. For example, in Delphix Corp. v. Embarcadero
Technologies, Inc., 749 Fed.Appx. 502, 505-06
(9th Cir. 2018), the defendant in 2012 while
headquartered in California allegedly began infringing on the
plaintiff's trademark. The plaintiff commenced suit in
California in February 2016. Claiming that it had merged with
another entity and moved its office headquarters to Texas in
or about October 2015, and thus was no longer “at
home” in California, the defendant moved to dismiss the
claims against it for lack of personal jurisdiction in
California. The trial court agreed but the 9th
Circuit reversed. It explained that “courts must
examine the defendant's contacts with the forum at the
time of the events underlying the dispute when determining
whether they have jurisdiction” and that “one
cannot defeat personal jurisdiction by a move away from the
state in which the underlying events took place.”
Suggesting that “a general jurisdiction inquiry should
consider all of a defendants contacts with the forum state
prior to the filing of the lawsuit, ” the court found
that the defendant had been located in California for two
decades before the suit was filed and that the recently move
of its headquarters “did not instantaneously dissolve
the general jurisdictional nexus [the defendant] had
established by its continuous and systematic operations in
California.” Id.
A fair
reading of Delphix is that jurisdiction is assessed
based on a lengthy look back at the defendant's presence
in the forum state, not just on the defendant's
citizenship at the moment the case was commenced.
Alternatively, one might, as does Chee Vang v. State Farm
Mut. Auto Ins. Co., 2019 WL 1676150 at *3 (D.Ariz. Apr.
17, 2019), read Delphix as applying the
“exceptional case” caveat of Daimler AG v.
Bauman, 517 U.S. 117, 139 n .19 (2014), which posits
that in certain exceptional circumstances, “a
corporation's operations in a forum other than its formal
place of incorporation or principal place of business may be
so substantial and of such a nature as to render the
corporation at home in that state” as well. Either
reading suffices to resolve Craftworks' jurisdictional
challenge here. It is clear that Craftworks had its principal
place of business in Colorado when the events alleged by Mr.
Vega occurred. Craftworks departed Colorado only three months
before Mr. Vega commenced suit in Colorado. In these
circumstances, this Court finds the analysis of
Delphix persuasive and that application of that
analysis here yields the same result: a conclusion that
Craftworks remains subject to general personal jurisdiction
in Colorado, notwithstanding the recent move of its
headquarters. Accordingly, the Court denies Craftworks'
motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction.
B.
Venue
28
U.S.C. § 1391 establishes the appropriate venue for
suits brought in federal court. As pertinent here, the
appropriate venue for this action is: (i) any judicial
district where the defendant resides (if the defendant
resides in the forum state), or (ii) any judicial district
“in which a substantial part of the events or omissions
giving rise to the claim occurred.”[1] 28 U.S.C. §
1391(b)(1), (2). For purposes of venue based on a
defendant's residency, the 10th Circuit
“will deem a corporate defendant to be a
‘resident' [of a district] for purposes of §
1391(a)(1) when the defendant is subject to personal
jurisdiction at the time the action is commenced.”
Employers Mut. Cas. Co. v. Bartile Roofs, Inc., 618
F.3d 1153, 1165 n. 10 (10th Cir. 2010),
citing 28 U.S.C. § 1391(c)(2) (an entity
“shall be deemed to reside . . . in any judicial
district in which such defendant is subject to the
court's personal jurisdiction”). Because the Court
has previously determined that Craftworks is subject to
personal jurisdiction in Colorado because its principal place
of business was in Colorado ...