In Gucci America v. Weixing Li, 2015 WL 5707135 (SDNY Sept. 29, 2015), the district court found that it had specific jurisdiction over a non-party Chinese bank and required it to produce customer account records, even though the production of those records violated Chinese bank secrecy laws. The Gucci decision sought to inoculate its jurisdictional reasoning by supposedly hewing closely to the New York Court of Appeals’ decision in Licci v. Lebanese Canadian Bank, 20 N.Y.3d 327 (2012). However, Gucci represents a significant departure from recent Second Circuit precedent as well as Licci, where New York’s highest court held that a foreign bank’s “mere maintenance” of a correspondent account in New York is insufficient to support the exercise of personal jurisdiction over that bank.
The court in Gucci gave insufficient weight to the bank’s non-party status in the equities of asserting specific jurisdiction over it. The court reasoned that the bank’s non-party status favored the requesting party, as the underlying dispute did not involve the bank’s “own liability.” That reasoning was not restrained by established precedent that the non-party status of a subpoena recipient increases—not lessens—the burden on the requesting party.
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