Nunez v. American Airlines, Inc.

What is the current procedural posture?

On July 24, 2025, Magistrate Judge Reid issued a Report and Recommendation (ECF No. 50) recommending that Defendant's Motion to Dismiss be granted and that Plaintiff's Complaint be dismissed with prejudice. The R&R rests on two independent grounds: (1) Montreal Convention preemption on the merits, and (2) Nunez's submission of fake case law and pattern of Local Rules violations as grounds for dismissal as a sanction. On the sanction prong, the R&R cited Nunez's submission of the two nonexistent cases, his history of Local Rules violations, and his prior case dismissal as aggravating factors. The R&R quoted the collecting authority from Versant Funding LLC and referenced O'Brien v. Flick, No. 24-61529-CIV, 2025 WL 242924 (S.D. Fla. Jan. 10, 2025). No monetary sanction was separately recommended. Whether District Judge Altman adopted the R&R is not confirmed on the publicly available record.

Why does Nunez v. American Airlines, Inc. matter for law firms using AI?

Nunez v. American Airlines illustrates how a magistrate judge can recommend dismissal with prejudice as a sanction for AI-hallucinated citations in an R&R, before the district judge acts on it. The R&R here is unusually clear on the AI dimension: the two fabricated cases Nunez cited, “Greene v. American Airlines” and “Doe v. Major Airline,” were confirmed nonexistent not by American Airlines’ assertion alone but by the magistrate judge’s own independent search. This “undersigned search” pattern creates a clean factual record: the court’s own verification eliminates the factual dispute that otherwise lets a pro se litigant argue the opposing party misidentified the citations.

The R&R structure is notable because the recommendation of dismissal with prejudice rests on two independent grounds. On the merits, Montreal Convention preemption bars Nunez’s claims. On the sanction prong, the R&R cited the fake citations, the history of Local Rules violations, and the prior dismissed case (1:24-cv-24470-RKA) as grounds for the maximum sanction. The dual-ground structure means the sanction recommendation stands independently of the merits analysis, which matters if the merits ground were contested on objection to the district judge. Whether Judge Altman adopted the R&R and entered final judgment has not been confirmed on the publicly available record.

The prior-case predicate is the most transferable doctrinal point. Nunez had been dismissed once already in the same court and before the same judge, on Local Rules grounds. The second filing added fabricated citations to the existing pattern of noncompliance. The court relied on the cumulative record to reach dismissal with prejudice without requiring an intermediate warning or monetary sanction. For defense counsel in the S.D. Fla. facing a pro se repeat filer, pulling the prior-case docket and documenting the Rule 11 history (even if the prior case did not involve an AI-citation issue) is the first step in building a record that supports the most severe sanctions.

The R&R uses two distinct collecting-authority cites for the AI-citation framing. Morgan v. Community Against Violence (D.N.M. Oct. 23, 2023) is the anchor for the proposition that courts “do not make allowances for a Plaintiff who cites to fake, nonexistent, misleading authorities.” O’Brien v. Flick (S.D. Fla. Jan. 10, 2025) is the anchor for the broader proposition that the “use of fake legal authority is problematic and warrants sanctions.” Versant Funding LLC also appears in the collecting-authority cluster. For defense counsel in S.D. Fla., the practical move is to pair Morgan and O’Brien rather than picking one; adjacent S.D. Fla. AI-citation orders like Monster v. Owoc converge on a different but overlapping pair (Versant Funding and ByoPlanet) for the same framing.