Nobody wants to get sued in California.

Not sure why. Its such a nice place to visit.

Indeed, with the rise of CIPA claims I know many companies that want to stay out of the California market altogether, even georestricting websites and refusing to call California area codes.

Eesh.

Well the good news for such California-phobic (say that 10 times fast) companies is that they can, indeed, avoid litigation in California by avoiding targeting consumers in the state as a new case makes clear.

In Terri Nichols v. Guidetoinsurance, LLC 2024 WL 1643701 (N.D. Cal. April 15, 2024) a Court dismissed a claim against a Defendant for lack of personal jurisdiction.

The facts are pretty simple. Nichols–a repeat-TCPA litigator– claims she received unwanted robocalls from Defendant. However the Defendant was not a California company and had not called a California phone number. That pretty much prevented the case from being heard in California:

Here, the purposeful direction test cannot support personal jurisdiction because Nichols cannot establish that Guidetoinsure targeted its advertising to her in California or knew that Nichols was a California resident when it made calls to her. To the contrary, Guidetoinsure has presented evidence that Nichols’s contact information was submitted through an online form in November 2021, and that the information included a phone number with a Virginia area code Accordingly, even if the prerecorded calls violated the TCPA, Guidetoinsure did not know from Nichols’s number that she was a California resident and would not have foreseen that making the phone calls to Nichols would cause harm in California

Pretty simple right?

One small wrinkle though.

Nichols argued that Defendant should have known it was calling California because she signed in from a California IP address. Now Defendant presented evidence it never received IP address information and avoided jurisdiction on that basis, but it is interesting to consider merely knowing a lead was submitted from California might be sufficient to afford jurisdiction there–even if a non-California number is called.

That last piece is unclear, however. The Court did not actually hold Defendant would have been subject to jurisdiction had it known the IP address was froom Cali, but it is an open issue.

So for those of you looking to avoid suit in the Golden State you may want to georestrict IP addresses for leads and not just limit calls to certain area codes.