Opinion ID: 203939
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Presumption in Favor of Plaintiff's Choice of Forum and Heightened Deference

Text: We need not reconcile our precedent today regarding whether a plaintiff's choice of her home forum carries a presumption of heightened deference because, even if this presumption were to apply, the district court did not commit error here. We disagree with IPI's contention that our case law would preclude a district court, if it found substantial support in the record for its conclusion, from considering a plaintiff's vexatious or oppressive motive for bringing suit in an alternative forum. [7] Thus, in the present case, we cannot conclude that the district court erred in finding IPI's choice of its home forum to be undeserving of heightened deference. The district court requested IPI to point to evidence in support of its purported explanation for requesting dismissal from the Israeli court, and IPI could not do so save for citing to a one-sentence claim it made during a hearing before the Israeli court. The fact that IPI could not provide this evidence, taken together with the fact that, here, IPI engaged in nearly four years of discovery in an Israeli foruma forum it initially chose [8] , and that IPI, according to the district court, subsequently moved to dismiss its suit on the verge of being ready for trial, adequately support the district court's determination that IPI was operating with a vexatious and oppressive motive. [9] We conclude that even if a presumption of heightened deference were to apply to a plaintiff's choice of a home forum, the district court did not err in denying the presumption to IPI. Further, as we discuss infra, because we hold that the district court did not abuse its discretion in determining that the public and private interest factors strongly favor the Israeli forum, we conclude that the district court did not err in finding that a presumption in favor of any ordinary deference to a plaintiff's choice of forum was overcome. See Iragorri, 203 F.3d at 17-18 (holding that presumption in favor of the plaintiff's choice of forum is overcome where the [trial] court has considered all relevant public and private interest factors, and where its balancing of these factors is reasonable (quoting Piper, 454 U.S. at 257, 102 S.Ct. 252)).