Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog
The complaint arrives about six months after the sale, and it is never really about the car. It is about the fee petition. A customer who bought a nine-year-old vehicle with ninety thousand miles on it, signed a buyer’s order marked as is, and drove it for five months now says the dealership committed consumer fraud. The pleading recites a repair the buyer paid for, attaches nothing, and demands actual damages, punitive damages, and attorney’s fees under the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act. Plaintiff’s counsel knows that the fees are the leverage and that the cost of defending a four-thousand-dollar dispute is what usually produces a settlement.
What the complaint rarely contains is the thing the statute actually requires, which is a deception that reached this buyer and caused this loss. The Consumer Fraud Act is a powerful remedial statute, and dealers that shade disclosures or bury charges deserve what it does to them. But the Act is not a warranty statute, it is not a substitute for a breach of contract claim, and it does not make a dealership the insurer of a used car. A defense built on those distinctions, early, resolves a large share of these cases before the fees that drive them have a chance to accumulate.