The discrimination charge died on a blown deadline - then the ChatGPT bill came due
An Illinois court tossed a worker's race bias claim against Starbucks - then fined her lawyer $15,000 for AI-fabricated citations.
The Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, on July 28, 2026, upheld the dismissal of a race discrimination charge brought by a Starbucks employee in downtown Chicago. In the same opinion, it sanctioned her attorney for filing briefs full of fake legal citations produced by artificial intelligence.
The underlying dispute started small. Between March and June 2022, the employee - an African American woman - clashed with a coworker and misgendered them. After a meeting with supervisors, she apologized. A Starbucks vice president then issued her a "corrective action memorandum" and, in the court's words, "reminded her to be respectful toward her coworkers."
The employee filed race discrimination charges with both the Illinois Department of Human Rights and the EEOC, claiming Starbucks disciplined and harassed her because of her race. The EEOC dismissed the charge in August 2022 and issued a right to sue letter.
That is where the case unraveled. Illinois law gives a worker 30 days to hand the state agency a copy of the EEOC's determination. The employee took 175 days. The court held that deadline is "jurisdictional" - miss it, and the agency loses its authority to act - and said it could not be extended, even for fairness. A state agency had separately found "no connection" between the discipline and the worker's race.
For employment teams handling dual-filed charges in Illinois, the timing rule is unforgiving: the agencies here investigated and held a hearing before anyone flagged the late submission, and it still sank the case.
The opinion drew wider attention for another reason. The court found the employee's attorney had submitted briefs containing false statutory quotations and citations to cases that either did not exist or did not say what he claimed. The lawyer conceded he used "a premier corporate subscription of ChatGPT" to draft filings and had "overlooked" the errors.
The court was blunt. It found the conduct "willful" and said he "intentionally persisted in his attempts to mislead the court." It declared: "The only acceptable standard is zero false citations." It ordered him to pay $15,000 - $1,500 for each of 10 false citations - and referred him to state disciplinary authorities. It rejected his explanation that the errors stemmed from "inexperience in appellate court," saying that claim raised questions about his "fitness to practice law generally."
The decision is final.
