The Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit has upheld an order pausing a consumer’s federal lawsuit over a used-car purchase while a parallel case proceeds in state court.
The background: The dispute traces back to a used-car purchase that the plaintiff says went badly wrong.
- In December 2018, the plaintiff went to a dealership to buy a used Porsche Cayenne, and her experience was, in the court’s words, “less than stellar.” She alleged the dealership falsified the car’s title and mileage records, forged her signature on the loan paperwork, withheld required written disclosures, and delivered a different vehicle than the one she had selected.
- She took the car and made payments on the auto loan, but stopped in August 2021 after learning the full extent of the alleged fraud. Collection activity followed and damaged her credit.
- In January 2022, she sued the dealership and related parties in Kansas state court over the botched purchase. Two days later, she filed a second lawsuit built on the same dispute in federal court.
- The defendants eventually asked the federal court to stay the case under the Colorado River doctrine, which allows a federal court to step aside when a duplicative state case is already pending. Representing herself, the plaintiff moved to strike that motion but never filed a substantive response to it.
The ruling: The Appeals Court affirmed the stay, finding that the plaintiff had forfeited her chance to challenge it.
- Judge Allison H. Eid of the Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, who wrote that the plaintiff’s failure to raise her arguments in the trial court “surely marks the end of the road for [her] argument for reversal.” Because she did not respond to the abstention motion and did not argue plain error on appeal, the court deemed those arguments waived and declined to review them.
- The plaintiff’s brief offered a single sentence requesting plain-error review, which the judge said came nowhere close to the analysis the standard requires.
- The most striking part of the opinion concerned the plaintiff’s legal citations. Judge Eid suspected several were the product of AI “hallucinations,” which she described as outputs that are “fictional, inaccurate, or nonsensical.” The plaintiff had disclosed using AI-based tools to help prepare her filings.
- The judge called the use of fabricated case law “particularly egregious,” noting that other courts had already put the plaintiff on notice about the practice, and that using AI does not excuse a litigant’s duty to read her filings and avoid misrepresentations.
- The court declined to sanction the plaintiff this time but warned that citing “hallucinated case law in future filings” would subject her to sanctions.
