DeCicco v. Dynata, LLC

Citations

• 225 Conn. App. 725

Syllabus

The plaintiffs commenced this action against the defendants, D Co. and certain officers of D Co., to recover damages for the wrongful death of twenty-nine adults who died as a result of a four-story building fire in Davao City, Philippines. The fire occurred at a call center where the decedents worked as employees of S Co. The officers of D Co. were also directors and shareholders of S Co. On or before the date of the incident, D Co., whose principal place of business was in Shelton, had secured contracts in the United States to perform work and to provide reports and data to its United States based clients on the basis of that work. D Co. outsourced certain of the work to S Co., specifically, to provide telephone, survey, polling, and data collection services from call centers in the Philippines. The defendants filed a motion to dismiss the plaintiffs' complaint on the ground of forum non conveniens, arguing that the Philippines was an adequate alternative forum to litigate the matter because the defendants were amenable to service of process, had stipulated to accept service of process and had agreed to litigate the dispute in the Philippines. The trial court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss, finding that the Philippines was an adequate alterna- tive forum, and the plaintiffs appealed to this court. Held: 1. The plaintiffs could not prevail on their claim that the trial court applied the wrong test, namely, ''that consent may be used as a substitute for jurisdiction,'' to determine whether the Philippines was an adequate alternative forum: the plaintiffs misinterpreted the court's decision, as a proper interpretation of the court's memorandum of decision was that the court used the test enunciated in Schertenleib v. Traum (589 F.2d 1156) to support its determination that the Philippines was a suitable forum notwithstanding competing expert testimony regarding whether the action was barred in the Philippines by the statute of limitations; moreover, the cou