Today, the North Supreme Court made it clear that there can be personal jurisdiction over a corporate officer even if his only contacts with the state were in his capacity as a corporate officer.
The case is Saft America, Inc. v. Plainview Batteries, Inc., The opinion reverses the April 2008 decision of the Court of Appeals, which had ruled in a split decision that the officer didn’t have sufficient minimum contacts with North Carolina to justify jurisdiction because he had no contact with the state in his "individual capacity."
The Supreme Court opinion is unfortunately a per curiam ruling, so it simply adopts without discussion the analysis of the dissenting opinion in the Court of Appeals. The key portion of that opinion, by Judge Arrowood, read as follows:
In sum, under North Carolina precedent the determination of whether personal jurisdiction is properly exercised over a defendant does not exclude consideration of defendant’s actions merely because they were undertaken in the course of his employment. In particular, the corporate actions of a defendant who is also an officer and principal shareholder of a corporation are imputed to him for purposes of deciding the issue of personal jurisdiction. On the other hand, personal jurisdiction cannot be based solely on a defendant’s employment status as the agent or officer of a company with ties to North Carolina, or on personal connections to North Carolina that fall short of the requisite "minimum contacts."
The contacts relied upon by the Court of Appeals dissent were that the corporate officer had been the plaintiff’s primary contact with the corporate defendant, he had traveled to North Carolina to visit the plaintiff’s facility, he had submitted purchase orders on behalf of the corporate defendant. and he had been personally involved "in negotiating and carrying out the contracts that gave rise to the instant lawsuit."
As Judge Arrowood put it in the opinion adopted by the Supreme Court, it does not "correctly state the law in North Carolina" that "actions taken by an individual in the course of his employment or in his ‘official’ capacity do not ‘count’ as part of a defendant’s contacts with the forum state."