Benshoof v. Chin
U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington · W.D. Wash. · Washington bar guidance
Conduct
Pro se plaintiff cited authority that the court could not locate on Westlaw, Lexis, or via internet search.
Consequence
Motion to dismiss granted; warning footnote on Rule 11 consequences for citing nonexistent authority. No sanction imposed.
Lesson
A footnote warning is the procedural step before a Rule 11 sanction; treat the next filing as the trigger event.
Verified May 7, 2026
- Citation
- Benshoof v. Chin, No. 2:24-cv-00808-JHC, 2025 WL 1414055 (W.D. Wash. May 15, 2025) (Chun, J.)
- Decided
- May 15, 2025
Summary
Pro se plaintiff Kurt Benshoof and additional pro se plaintiffs sued Andrea Chin and roughly fifty other defendants in a sprawling civil-rights action arising out of King County family-court proceedings. In opposing defendants Russ and Cliber's motion to dismiss, plaintiffs cited an authority for which Judge John H. Chun could not find any record on Westlaw, Lexis, or via internet search. The court footnoted the fundamentals of Rule 11(b)(2) and reminded plaintiffs that filing a signed motion that cites nonexistent authority is itself a basis for sanctions, citing the developing line of cases warning pro se litigants that generative AI can produce hallucinated citations.
- AI tool:
- Generative AI inferred from the citation pattern; specific tool not identified on the record
What sanction did the court impose?
Court granted the Russ and Cliber motion to dismiss on the merits and did not impose sanctions in the May 15 order. The footnote serves as a formal warning on the record that future filings citing nonexistent authority can trigger Rule 11 consequences. The matter is captioned Benshoof v. Ferguson on the W.D. Wash. docket; the Westlaw rendering uses the Chin caption because Andrea Chin is the lead-named defendant in the operative amended complaint.
Why does Benshoof v. Chin matter for law firms using AI?
Benshoof v. Chin sits inside one of the longest-running pro se civil-rights matters in the Western District of Washington. Kurt Benshoof was declared a vexatious litigant in a related W.D. Wash. case (Benshoof v. Admon, 2:23-cv-01392-JNW, Feb. 11, 2025) and is incarcerated as of the May 15, 2025 order; the operative First Amended Complaint runs over 250 pages and names roughly fifty defendants drawn from King County family-court personnel, Seattle police, and private attorneys involved in earlier ORAL (Order Restricting Abusive Litigation) proceedings against him. The court’s May 15 order disposes of one set of defendants on Rule 12(b)(6) grounds; the AI-citation footnote is at the end and is functionally a final-warning posture rather than a holding.
The W.D. Wash. caption Benshoof v. Ferguson and the Westlaw caption Benshoof v. Chin both refer to the same matter; the operative complaint names Andrea Chin as the lead defendant. For firm purposes, the order is most useful as a reference point on what a Rule 11 warning footnote looks like before any sanction has been imposed: the court restates the certification standard, names “hallucinated” AI citations as the operative concern, and points to a developing collecting-cases line through Saxena v. Martinez-Hernandez (D. Nev. Apr. 23, 2025). A managing partner reviewing internal AI policy can use this footnote as the upstream cite for the proposition that judges have begun building a paper trail well before they reach for sanctions.
Implications for your firm
Operational steps a firm reading this case may wish to consider documenting. Strategic and rule-application calls belong to your firm's attorneys.
- Read judges' citation-reliability footnotes as warning shots, not dicta; the next filing in the same case becomes the procedural trigger if the conduct repeats.
- When researching against a self-represented adversary with multiple parallel matters, check sister dockets for prior fictitious-citation findings before relying on a peace-of-mind assumption that opposing pleadings will not require independent verification.
- The Chun footnote relies on Saxena v. Martinez-Hernandez (D. Nev. 2025) for its collecting-cases citation; that thread is now load-bearing across multiple districts and is a useful one-line citation for any judge-side AI policy memo.