Bajer Design & Marketing, Inc. v. Whitney Design,, Inc., No. 09 C 1815, Slip Op. (N.D. Ill. Jun. 26, 2009) (Zagel, J.).
Judge Zagel denied defendant Whitney Design’s ("Whitney") Section 1404(a) motion to transfer plaintiff Bajer Design & Marketing’s ("Bajer") patent infringement case to the Eastern District of Missouri, where Whitney filed a declaratory judgment case after being served with Bajer’s complaint. Although Bajer was not a Chicago-based company, its choice of forum still deserved significant deference because the alleged injury occurred in Chicago. Bajer filed the complaint after identifying the accused infringement at the International Housewares Show in Chicago. Whitney argued that the accused infringement occurred in the St. Louis area where Whitney researched and designed the accused clothes hampers. But the Court held that the point of sale, Chicago, was the situs of the injury.
Whitney also argued that convenience of the parties weighed in favor of transfer because all of its documents and people were in the St. Louis area. But the Court held convenience weighed against transfer because the parties could transfer documents electronically and, in any event, the documents would have to be sent to the parties’ counsel across the midwest. And the convenience of third parties also weighed against transfer. The only third party, the inventor, lived in Iowa almost equidistant from Chicago and St. Louis.
Finally, the interests of justice did not weigh in favor of transfer. Whitney argued that time to trial in the Eastern District of Missouri was significantly faster than in the Northern District of Illinois. But the Court held that those statistics were irrelevant because they were for all cases, not split up by case types.
The Court denied Bajer’s preliminary injunction motion seeking to enjoin the Eastern District of Missouri case. Because that court stayed its case pending the Northern District of Illinois’s decision on the transfer motion, there was no need to enjoin a stayed case.