Dutcher v. Matheson, 840 F.3d 1183 (10th Cir. 2016).
In this action, affirming the judgment of a district court in Utah denying the plaintiffs’ motion to remand, the Tenth Circuit found that differences in the causes of action pleaded are not enough to distinguish cases under the demands of CAFA’s local-controversy exception, which looks exclusively to whether the other case has asserted “the same or similar factual allegations,” not the same or similar causes of action. Additionally, the Tenth Circuit held that the home-state exception requires all primary defendants to be citizens of the state in which the action was brought.
The plaintiffs, mortgage borrowers, brought a putative class action in Utah state court against the defendant ReconTrust Company, a national bank, alleging that ReconTrust illegally non-judicially foreclosed on the plaintiffs’ properties. Plaintiffs allege that depository institutions like ReconTrust did not have authority to enforce the power-of-sale provisions in the deeds of trust that secured the properties. Plaintiffs also sued the defendants BAC Home Loans Servicing (“BAC”) and Bank of America, N.A. (“BOA”), as the former trustees who transferred trusteeship to ReconTrust, as well as attorney Stuart Matheson and his law firm, as the agents who conducted the foreclosure sale on behalf of ReconTrust.
To secure the financing used to purchase their properties, the plaintiffs had executed deeds of trust that provided their lenders with a lien interest in...
