Courts across jurisdictions have grappled for years with reconciling the personal jurisdiction “minimum contacts” test with the fact that “the [I]nternet operates ‘in’ every state regardless of where the user is physically located, potentially rendering the territorial limits of personal jurisdiction meaningless.” EnhanceWorks, Inc. v. Dropbox, Inc., No. M2018-01227-COA-R3-CV, 2019 WL 1220903, at *8 (Tenn. Ct. App. Mar. 14, 2019) (quoting Shrader v. Biddinger, 633 F.3d 1235 (10th Cir. 2011)). Until recently, Tennessee courts had only skimmed the surface of this issue.
On March 14, 2019, the Tennessee Court of Appeals adopted a new standard in EnhanceWorks v. Dropbox for analyzing whether an Internet contact suffices to establish personal jurisdiction. Tennessee common law already recognized that “[a] defendant’s contacts are sufficiently meaningful when they demonstrate that the defendant has purposefully targeted Tennessee to the extent that the defendant should reasonably anticipate being haled into court here.” Id (quoting State v. NV Sumatra Tobacco Trading Co., 403 S.W.3d 726, 760 (Tenn. 2013)). Applying this rationale to Internet contacts, the appellate court articulated the following test:
[F]or a defendant’s Internet contacts to be sufficiently meaningful, they must be more than “passive Internet activity” such that the defendant directs electronic activity into Tennessee “with the manifested intent of engaging business or other interactions in the State thus creating in a person within the State a potential cause of action cognizable in [Tennessee].”
Id. (quoting ALS Scan, Inc. v. Dig. Serv. Consultants, Inc., 293 F.3d 707, 714 (4th Cir. 2002)). In an apparent attempt to foreclose nominal Internet activity from qualifying as sufficient “minimum contacts,” the court further “conclude[d] that merely accessing a public website from the Internet does not, in itself, subject the individual accessing the site to personal jurisdiction wherever the website may be located.” Id. (citation omitted). “Observing a public website on the Internet is ‘passive Internet activity,’ which ‘does not generally include directing electronic activity into the State.’” Id. (quoting ALS Scan, 293 F.3d at 714).
Additionally, the Court of Appeals found that a similar test, the Zippo test, “would be concordant with Tennessee case law concerning personal jurisdiction,” despite determining that the model did not apply to the facts in EnhanceWorks. The appellate court adopted the Sixth Circuit’s explanation of the Zippo test:
The “operation of an Internet website can constitute the purposeful availment of the...
