Opinion
No. 04 C 4616.
July 16, 2004
MEMORANDUM ORDER
Chapman and Cutler LLP ("Chapman") has sued Allco Finance Corporation ("Allco") for unpaid legal fees and expenses, seeking to invoke federal diversity of citizenship jurisdiction. Because Chapman's Complaint is (quite astonishingly) deficient in that respect, this memorandum order is issued sua sponte to require that subject matter jurisdiction be established properly.
Complaint ¶ 2 conforms appropriately enough to the dual corporate citizenship provision of 28 U.S.C. § 1332(c)(1), for it identifies both Nevada and New York citizenship on Allco's part. But all that Complaint ¶ 1 says about Chapman itself is this:
Chapman is an Illinois limited liability partnership, having its principal place of business in Chicago, Illinois.
It is a source of bemusement whenever counsel who are (or ought to be) familiar with federal practice demonstrate an unawareness of the principle that was established by the ultimate judicial authority nearly a decade and a half ago: that whenever any partnership (including a limited partnership) is named as a "party" to a lawsuit, the relevant citizenship for federal diversity purposes is that of all partners and not that of the partnership itself (Carden v. Arkoma Assocs., 494 U.S. 185, 195-96 (1990) and cases cited there). But for that principle to be unknown to the litigators in a major law firm, seeking to sue on its own behalf, really boggles the mind.
In any event, the question that Chapman must address for diversity purposes is whether even one of its 200 or so lawyers is a citizen of Nevada or New York, which would of course destroy the total diversity that has been required for nearly two centuries by the line of cases beginning with Strawbridge v. Curtiss, 7 U.S. (3 Cranch) 267 (1806). Accordingly Chapman's counsel are granted leave to file an appropriate amendment to Complaint ¶ 1 (not a full-blown and self-contained Amended Complaint) in this Court's chambers on or before July 23, 2004. In the absence of such an appropriate filing, or if the filing were to disclose a lack of total diversity, this Court would be constrained to dismiss both the Complaint and this action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.