Opinion ID: 1359551
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Similar Claims

Text: The foregoing analysis does not end our inquiry. When the Nebraska court denied the Joint Venture's motion to dismiss the lien claim, the Joint Venture answered Controlled Air's lien foreclosure action in the Nebraska court. At that same time, to protect its contract interests in the face of Controlled Air's federal motion to dismiss, the Joint Venture, while refusing to acknowledge the correctness of Nebraska venue, asserted its breach of contract action in state court, but only out of an abundance of caution. Controlled Air, No. CI07319, answer and counterclaim at 2. So, at that point in time, the contract action asserted by the Joint Venture against Controlled Air was, ostensibly, pending in both the Nebraska court and the federal district court for the Eastern District of Missouri. [8] This event, however, did not trigger parallelism between the proceedings pending in the two courts. The principle cases in this circuit defining when actions become parallel for abstention purposes are Scottsdale Insurance Co. v. Detco Industries, Inc., 426 F.3d 994 (8th Cir.2005), and Royal Indemnity Co. v. Apex Oil Co. Inc., 511 F.3d 788 (8th Cir.2008). As opposed to Colorado River abstention, these cases concern the so-called Wilton/Brillhart abstention doctrine, Wilton v. Seven Falls Co., 515 U.S. 277, 115 S.Ct. 2137, 132 L.Ed.2d 214 (1995); Brillhart v. Excess Insurance Co. of America, 316 U.S. 491, 62 S.Ct. 1173, 86 L.Ed. 1620 (1942), a doctrine granting broader discretion to abstain but continuing to require federal-state parallelism. Scottsdale counsels that the threshold issue ... is whether parallel proceedings were pending in state court at the time [the federal plaintiff] brought its [federal] action. 426 F.3d at 996. In this case, such rule defeats a parallelistic outcome because the Joint Venture's federal action was filed well before Controlled Air's Nebraska lien foreclosure claim and much longer before the Joint Venture's Nebraska breach of contract assertion. While Royal Indemnity might be read to provide a different result based strictly upon a filing time, it otherwise demands that the state court proceeding must present [to the federal court] `the same issues, not governed by federal law, between the same parties.' 511 F.3d at 796 (emphasis added) (quoting Brillhart, 316 U.S. at 495, 62 S.Ct. 1173). Such a circumstance did not exist in this case at the time the federal court abstained from and dismissed the Joint Venture's contract action. Notwithstanding the federal court's erroneous conclusion that adjudication of the forum selection clause be best left to the sound judgment of the Nebraska state court, enforcement, or not, of the contractual forum selection clause was a federal court procedural matter governed by federal law. Servewell Plumbing, LLC v. Fed. Ins. Co., 439 F.3d 786, 789 (8th Cir. 2006); Rainforest Café, Inc. v. EklecCo, L.L.C., 340 F.3d 544, 546 (8th Cir.2003); Int'l Software Sys., Inc. v. Amplicon, Inc., 77 F.3d 112, 114-15 (5th Cir.1996); Jones v. Weibrecht, 901 F.2d 17, 19 (2d Cir.1990); Manetti-Farrow, Inc. v. Gucci Amer., Inc., 858 F.2d 509, 513 (9th Cir.1988); Stewart Org., Inc. v. Ricoh Corp., 810 F.2d 1066, 1068 (11th Cir.1987) (en banc) (per curiam), aff'd on other grounds, 487 U.S. 22, 108 S.Ct. 2239, 101 L.Ed.2d 22 (1988); Vessel Systems, Inc. v. Sambucks, LLC, No. 05-DF-1028-LLR, 2007 WL 715773 (N.D.Iowa Mar.6, 2007). So, even as asserted in both jurisdictions, the Joint Venture's contract claim presents a federal law forum selection issue, at least in the federal court. This, of course, defeats parallelism under Royal Indemnity precedent.