On December 16, 2021, the Court of Appeals issued a decision in Estate of Kainer v. UBS AG, 2021 NY Slip Op. 07056, holding that a court need not consider whether it has personal jurisdiction over a defendant before deciding a forum non conveniens motion, explaining:
As a preliminary matter, plaintiffs assert that the courts below should not have addressed forum non conveniens without first resolving—and rejecting—certain defendants’ claims that the court lacked personal jurisdiction over them. Plaintiffs rely upon a statement in this Court’s decision in Ehrlich-Bober & Co. v University of Houston (49 NY2d 574, 579 [1980]) that “the doctrine [of forum non conveniens] has no application unless the court has obtained in personam jurisdiction of the parties.” Plaintiff’s reliance on this statement for the proposition that personal jurisdiction must be resolved before a forum non conveniens argument can be considered is misplaced. This procedural issue was not presented to either the Appellate Division or this Court in Ehrlich-Bober, where Supreme Court had, in fact, addressed and credited both grounds for dismissal, concluding that personal jurisdiction was lacking and the action should be dismissed on forum non conveniens grounds. The statement on which plaintiffs rely appears in the procedural history portion of our decision and was simply a description of the Appellate Division decision—in concluding that a forum non conveniens dismissal was not warranted and dismissing on an unrelated ground, the Appellate Division implicitly disagreed with the conclusion of Supreme Court that personal jurisdiction was lacking. We did not hold in Ehrlich-Bober that a court invariably must resolve any outstanding personal jurisdiction issue prior to addressing forum non conveniens, decline to adopt such a rule in this case, and conclude that the court here did not abuse its discretion in that regard.
(Internal citations omitted).