Foreign Tire Manufacturer Dismissed from Kansas Product Liability Case for Lack of Personal Jurisdiction

In a products liability case involving an injury resulting from an allegedly faulty motorcycle tire, the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas granted motions to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction where the plaintiffs failed to show that a foreign tire manufacturer and its parent companies had “minimum contacts” with Kansas sufficient for the court to reasonably exercise jurisdiction.  The court indicated that the plaintiffs merely offered “conclusory allegations” both for the proposition that the manufacturer and its parent companies should be considered the same entity and that the manufacturer and its parent companies used a “sophisticated global distribution system” to avail itself of the forum.  To the contrary, where the court found (1) that the foreign manufacturer delivered its tires to an independent distributor in Brazil, (2) the distributor unilaterally decided when and where to distribute the tires in the U.S., and (3) the record contained no evidence of “something more,” such as information about the quantity of the manufacturer’s tires flowing into Kansas, the court concluded that the evidence did not “satisfy the constitutional analysis of minimum contacts and purposeful availment, each of which rest upon a particular notion of defendant-focused fairness.”