IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS

EASTERN DIVISION

Alexis Parker and Latisha Rhodes, )

Plaintiffs, )

) No. 20 C 5103

v. )

) Judge Ronald A. Guzmán

IAS Logistics DFW, LLC, d/b/a )

Pinnacle Logistics, )

Defendant. )

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

For the reasons stated below, the motion to dismiss the claims of non-Illinois Plaintiff 

Latisha Rhodes and the out-of-state opt-in plaintiffs [59] is granted. 

STATEMENT

“The validity of an order of a federal court depends upon that court’s having jurisdiction 

over both the subject matter and the parties.” Ins. Corp. of Ir., Ltd. v. Compagnie des Bauxites 

de Guinee, 456 U.S. 694, 701 (1982). Pinnacle contends that the Court lacks personal 

jurisdiction over the claims asserted by the out-of-state opt-in plaintiffs in this FLSA action. 

Courts may exercise personal jurisdiction only if the defendant has “certain minimum contacts” 

with the forum state “such that the maintenance of the suit does not offend ‘traditional notions of 

fair play and substantial justice.’” Int’l Shoe Co. v. Wash., 326 U.S. 310, 316 (1945) (citation 

omitted). Two types of personal jurisdiction exist: general and specific jurisdiction. BristolMyers Squibb Co. v. Sup. Ct. of Cal., 137 S. Ct. 1773, 1779-80 (2017). The parties agree that 

general jurisdiction is not at issue here. As to specific jurisdiction, a court can hear those claims 

only if the “cause of action . . . arise[s] out of or relate[s] to” the defendant’s forum-state 

activities. Helicopteros Nacionales de Columbia, S.A. v. Hall, 466 U.S. 408, 414 (1984). 

When a federal statute is at issue, “Congress’ typical mode of providing for the exercise 

of personal jurisdiction has been to authorize service of process.”1 BNSF Ry. Co. v. Tyrrell, 137 

S. Ct. 1549, 1555 (2017). The FLSA, however, does not include a provision authorizing 

nationwide service of process. “[A]bsent consent, a basis for service of a summons on the 

defendant is prerequisite to the exercise of personal jurisdiction.” Id. at 1556. Therefore, 

because nationwide service of process is not provided for in the statute, Pinnacle “is amenable to 

service (and hence subject to personal jurisdiction) only if it could be served in Illinois under 

Illinois law.” Mobile Anesthesiologists Chi., LLC v. Anesthesia Assocs. of Houston Metroplex, 

P.A., 623 F.3d 440, 443 (7th Cir. 2010); see also Curry v. Revolution Labs., LLC, 949 F.3d 385, 

1 Rule 4(k)(1)(C) provides that service establishes personal jurisdiction “when authorized by a 

federal statute.”

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393 (7th Cir. 2020) (citing Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(k)(1)(A)).

2

 Illinois’s long-arm statute permits the 

exercise of personal jurisdiction if it would be allowed under either the Illinois Constitution or 

the United States Constitution,” and the Seventh Circuit has “held that there is no operative 

difference between these two constitutional limits.” Id. 

Pinnacle’s primary source of support for its contention that the Court lacks personal 

jurisdiction over the out-of-state opt-in plaintiffs is the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in 

Bristol-Myers, 137 S. Ct. 1773. The Bristol-Myers case involved 678 individual product-liability 

claims that had been joined in a California-based mass action. Id. at 1778. Nearly 600 of those 

claims belonged to nonresidents. Id. To establish personal jurisdiction, the nonresidents argued

that their claims resembled those of the California plaintiffs. Id. The Supreme Court reversed, 

holding that the similarity of the nonresidents’ claims to those of the residents provided “an 

insufficient basis for jurisdiction.” Id. at 1781. Despite having incurred the “same injuries” as 

the California plaintiffs in the same manner and from the same cause, the Supreme Court 

concluded that the nonresident plaintiffs had failed to show “a connection between the forum and 

the[ir] specific claims.” Id.

The Supreme Court stated that “[s]ince our decision concerns the due process limits on 

the exercise of specific jurisdiction by a State, we leave open the question whether the Fifth

Amendment imposes the same restrictions on the exercise of personal jurisdiction by a federal 

court.” Id. at 1783-84. The Seventh Circuit recently confronted this issue in the context of a 

Rule 23 nationwide class action under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”). 

Mussat v. IQVIA, Inc., 953 F.3d 441 (7th Cir. 2020). The Seventh Circuit distinguished the Rule 

23 TCPA action from the mass-tort suit in Bristol-Myers, holding that “[i]n a Rule 23 class 

action . . . the lead plaintiffs earn the right to represent the interests of absent class members . . . 

[, who] are not full parties to the case for many purposes,” including the personal-jurisdiction 

analysis. Id. at 447. Thus, the Mussat court concluded, the “the principles announced in BristolMyers do not apply to the case of a nationwide class action filed in federal court under a federal 

statute”; instead, in the Rule 23 context, “the named representatives must be able to demonstrate 

either general or specific personal jurisdiction, but the unnamed class members are not required 

to do so.” Id. at 443, 447. 

Because the determinative issue for the Mussat court was that the named plaintiffs act in 

a representative capacity in a Rule 23 nationwide class action, this Court looks to whether the 

same can be said for collective action opt-in plaintiffs and starts with the FLSA’s express 

language, which states that each individual who joins an FLSA collective action is a real party in 

interest. 29 U.S.C. § 216(b) (“No employee shall be a party plaintiff to any such action unless he 

gives his consent in writing to become such a party”). One court has interpreted this language to 

mean that “29 U.S.C. § 216(b) is a rule of joinder giving legal status to individual opt-in 

plaintiffs.” See McNutt v. Swift Transp. Co. of Ariz., LLC, No. C18-5668 BHS, 2020 WL 

3819239, at *7 (W.D. Wash. July 7, 2020) (citation omitted). 

2 Rule 4(k)(1)(A) provides that serving a summons establishes personal jurisdiction only over 

those defendants who are “subject to the jurisdiction of a court of general jurisdiction in the state 

where the district court is located.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 4(k)(1)(A). 

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The Supreme Court has noted that “Rule 23 actions are fundamentally different” from 

collective actions under the FLSA, stating that “[w]hatever significance ‘conditional 

certification’ may have in § 216(b) proceedings, it is not tantamount to class certification under 

Rule 23.” Genesis Healthcare Corp. v. Symczyk, 569 U.S. 66, 74, 78 (2013). “Under the FLSA, 

. . . , ‘conditional certification’ does not produce a class with an independent legal status, or join 

additional parties to the action”; instead, “[t]he sole consequence of conditional certification is 

the sending of court-approved written notice to employees, who in turn become parties to a 

collective action only by filing written consent with the court.” Id. at 75 (emphasis added). “In a 

Rule 23 class action, by contrast, the lead plaintiffs earn the right to represent the interests of 

absent class members by satisfying all four criteria of Rule 23(a) and one branch of Rule 23(b).” 

Mussat, 953 F.3d at 447. The same strictures, however, do not apply to an FLSA collective. See

Espenscheid v. DirectSat USA, LLC, 705 F.3d 770, 772 (7th Cir. 2013) (noting “the absence 

from the collective-action section of the [FLSA] of the kind of detailed procedural provisions 

found in Rule 23”). 

While an FLSA action may resemble a Rule 23 class action in the sense that 

representative evidence is relied upon in certifying the collective action, “one function of the 

procedural provisions in Rule 23 is to protect the rights of unnamed class members, who need 

such protection because unless they are permitted to and do opt out of the class they will be

bound by the judgment or settlement. In contrast, collective actions bind only opt-ins.” Id. The 

representative nature of a collective action, then, differs from that of a Rule 23 class action given 

that each opt-in plaintiff in a collective action is protecting his or her own interests by 

affirmatively agreeing to become a party. 

Plaintiffs argue that the FLSA was designed to provide an efficient vehicle for resolving 

wage claims against employers, and that excluding out-of-state opt-ins runs counter to this goal. 

However, the Court retains an obligation to monitor, if requested, its jurisdiction over the parties. 

See, e.g., Bigger v. Facebook, Inc., 947 F.3d 1043, 1050 (7th Cir. 2020) (“Even if efficiency 

favors sending notice to individuals who entered arbitration agreements, efficiency cannot 

override the court’s obligations to maintain neutrality and to shield against abuse of the 

collective-action device.”). Plaintiffs further contend that a conclusion that a court lacks 

personal jurisdiction over a defendant with respect to the claims of out-of-state opt-ins means an 

FLSA plaintiff would never be able to bring or represent a nationwide collective action other 

than in the defendant’s home state. That may be true, but this is an issue for Congress to 

address; indeed, Congress amended the FLSA in response to the initial “rush of litigation” 

caused by early Supreme Court opinions interpreting it: 

The Supreme Court’s early decisions interpreting the FLSA led to a great rush of 

litigation under the statute. See generally Hoffmann–La Roche Inc. v. Sperling,

493 U.S. 165, 173, 110 S. Ct. 482, 107 L.Ed.2d 480 (1989). Congress responded 

in the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, 61 Stat. 84, as amended, 29 U.S.C. §§ 251–

262, by both eliminating “representative” actions (where employees would 

designate another to sue on their behalf) and by adding the opt-in provision to the 

statute for collective actions brought by employees. The effect was to “limit[] 

private FLSA plaintiffs to employees who asserted claims in their own right and 

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 free[] employers of the burden of representative actions.” Hoffmann–La Roche 

 Inc., 493 U.S. at 173, 110 S. Ct. 482. 

Ervin v. OS Rest. Services, Inc., 632 F.3d 971, 977–78 (7th Cir. 2011). Congress acts when it 

deems it necessary, and the absence of a provision in the FLSA allowing nationwide service of 

process, while not determinative, is telling. Omni Cap. Int’l, Ltd. v. Rudolf Wolff & Co., Ltd., 

484 U.S. 97, 106 (1987) (“Congress knows how to authorize nationwide service of process when 

it wants to provide for it. That Congress failed to do so here argues forcefully that such 

authorization was not its intention.”). 

 

 For these reasons, the Court finds that personal jurisdiction over the defendant must exist 

as to each opt-in. “[I]t is difficult to come to a different conclusion given the language in 

Bristol-Myers, which is repeated twice in the opinion, to the effect that for each plaintiff, there 

must be an affiliation between the forum and the underlying controversy, principally, an activity 

or occurrence that takes place in the forum State.” Chavira v. OS Rest. Servs., LLC, No. 18-CV10029-ADB, 2019 WL 4769101, at *1 (D. Mass. Sep. 30, 2019) (internal quotation marks and 

citations omitted). 

 The Court’s conclusion is further supported by the first two circuit-court opinions to have 

addressed this issue, which has resulted in a nationwide split at the district-court level. Both the 

Sixth and Eighth Circuits have recently concluded that a district court does not have personal 

jurisdiction over a defendant with respect to FLSA collective-action claims brought by out-ofstate opt-in plaintiffs. See Canaday v. Anthem Cos., Inc., --- F.4th ---, 2021 WL 3629916, at *4 

(6th Cir. Aug. 17, 2021) (“The principles animating Bristol-Myers’s application to mass actions 

under California law apply with equal force to FLSA collective actions under federal law.”); 

Vallone v. CJS Sols. Grp., LLC, --- F.4th ---, 2021 WL 3640222, at *3 (8th Cir. Aug. 18, 2021) 

(in the context of personal jurisdiction, finding that the district “court properly excluded [FLSA] 

claims with no connection to Minnesota”). 

 Finally, for the same reasons as stated by the Canaday court, the Court concludes that it 

cannot exercise pendent personal jurisdiction over Pinnacle with respect to the claims by the 

non-Illinois opt-in plaintiffs or Plaintiff Rhodes, who lives and worked in Maryland. See

Canaday, 2021 WL 3629916, at *7. 

Date: September 9, 2021 ____________________________ 

 Ronald A. Guzmán 

United States District Judge

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