Related to thread-local sessions and JBPM-297 (http://jira.jboss.com/jira/browse/JBPM-297), it's also worth pointing out that jBPM objects returned to and dereferenced within the JSP/view layer will break because of Hibernate lazy loading. If you are already using the open-session-in-view pattern for this issue with other persistent objects, the same fix that addressed JBPM-297 would address this case as well.