The Wisconsin Court of Appeals has affirmed the denial of a motion for reconsideration in a lawsuit that included a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act claim against a pair of creditors that repossessed a vehicle the plaintiffs said they had purchased in cash from a third party.
The background: The plaintiffs alleged they paid more than $29,000 in cash to an individual to purchase a 2015 Lexus.
- The plaintiffs returned home to Illinois, where they registered the vehicle and received an Illinois title.
- About six months later, the defendants had a towing company remove the Lexus from the plaintiffs’ residence, repossessing the vehicle under a judgment the defendants had obtained against the individual who sold the vehicle to the plaintiffs.
- The plaintiffs sued the defendants and the seller, alleging 10 counts, including civil theft, breach of contract, violations of the Wisconsin Consumer Act and the FDCPA, trespass, conversion, and replevin.
- The Circuit Court dismissed all the claims against the defendants with prejudice, ruling the Wisconsin Consumer Act did not apply and that there was no contract between the plaintiffs and the defendants.
- The plaintiffs did not appeal that order, instead moving for reconsideration, arguing the court applied the wrong legal standard and failed to accept the allegations in the complaint as true. They called the civil theft claim the “linchpin” of the case, arguing that if they were bona fide purchasers of the Lexus, the defendants had no right to repossess it, and the other claims should follow.
- The Circuit Court denied the motion, ruling the plaintiffs had not sufficiently pleaded that they were bona fide purchasers and that their objection to the dismissal being with prejudice, raised for the first time at the hearing, came too late.
The ruling: The Appeals Court affirmed the denial of the motion for reconsideration, ruling the plaintiffs “merely took umbrage with the court’s ruling and rehashed old arguments.”
- To win reconsideration, a party must present newly discovered evidence or establish a manifest error of law or fact, a heightened showing that requires more than disappointment with the outcome, the Appeals Court noted.
- The plaintiffs argued the Circuit Court turned a “wholesale blind-eye to the four corners” of their complaint, but the Appeals Court found the lower court properly distinguished pleaded facts from legal conclusions and exhaustively reviewed the complaint before reaffirming its ruling.
- The Circuit Court was within its discretion to limit its analysis to the civil theft claim, since that was the only claim the plaintiffs substantively briefed, describing the case as a “domino effect on civil theft.”
- The plaintiffs forfeited their challenge to the dismissal being with prejudice because they failed to object to the proposed order under a local rule giving parties five business days to do so and never briefed the issue in their reconsideration motion.
