LEGAL MEMOS

Schlichter v. Kennedy (2025) 116 Cal.App.5th 24. This case reviews a phenomenon that’s being seen more and more often. An attorney cited legal authority in a petition for a writ and also in his opening brief which were fictitious, and was served with an order to show cause why sanctions should not be imposed. The attorney claimed that the spurious citations resulted from clerical error unrelated to the use of artificial intelligence, which the court found not to be credible. There were four spurious citations which were completely different from the correct citations for the actual existing cases that had the case names used, and the actual existing cases did not support the legal propositions for which they were cited. Sanctions were imposed.

OneTaste, Inc. v. Netflix, Inc. (2025) 116 Cal.App.5th 174. This is a SLAPP case. The defendant filed a SLAPP motion following a lawsuit for defamation based on a documentary shown by the defendant which allegedly contained false statements about the practices of the plaintiff. The court found that the SLAPP statute applied because documentaries about issues of public interest are akin to news reporting and that the plaintiff failed to demonstrate a probability of prevailing on the element of actual malice because it did not present any clear and convincing evidence to show that the documentary maker was aware of the probable falsity or deliberately avoided investigating the veracity of the challenged statements made. The evidence instead suggested that the documentary maker had a subjective belief in the truth of the statements made at the time of publication because multiple media outlets had previously reported on the same controversy.

Sproul v. Vallee (2025) 116 Cal.App.5th 285. This was a case in which the plaintiffs, who were a husband and wife, sued a neighbor after the neighbor’s husband had physically assaulted the plaintiff’s wife and then took his own life. The court held that as pled, no cause of action was stated, but that plaintiff should have been allowed leave to expand on their cause of action for negligent misrepresentation, which if reasonable reliance was shown would have stated a cause of action.

/lsa