In Cole v. Lee, 2026 IL App (1st) 252223-U, the appellate court struck Cole’s brief and dismissed his appeal entirely for violations of Illinois Supreme Court Rule 341(h)(7) — the rule requiring an appellant’s brief to support its argument with citations to authority. The problems fell into two related categories:

1. Misattributing propositions to cases that don’t support them

Cole cited real, correctly-identified cases but claimed they stood for propositions they simply didn’t contain:

• He cited Avery v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., 216 Ill. 2d 100 (2005), for the proposition that Consumer Fraud Act damages claims are legal claims triable to a jury — but the court found nothing in Averysupporting that.
• He cited People ex rel. Daley v. Datacom Systems Corp., 146 Ill. 2d 1 (1991), for the proposition that when legal and equitable issues are joined, the legal issues must go to a jury — again, unsupported by the actual case.

2. Miscited case citations (wrong volume/page combinations)

Beyond mischaracterizing holdings, several of his citations didn’t correspond to the cases he named at all:

• “Stephens v. Kasten, 334 Ill. App. 3d 1004″ — Stephens is actually a supreme court case at 383 Ill. 127 (1943); the citation he gave instead landed on an unrelated criminal case, People v. Lewis.
• “In re Estate of Mulvaney, 288 Ill. App. 3d 464″ — Mulvaney actually begins at 128 Ill. App. 3d 133 (1984); his citation instead pointed to a different criminal case, People v. Lambert.
• The court noted the same pattern recurred with his citations to Kaiser v. MEPC American Properties and Harris Trust & Savings Bank v. Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine — and that these were just the errors in the firstof three argument subsections.

Why this was fatal rather than just criticized

The court invoked the principle that a reviewing court is “entitled to have the issues clearly defined and supported by pertinent authority” and is not obligated to “act as an advocate or seek error in the record” on the appellant’s behalf (quoting U.S. Bank v. Lindsey). Rule 341(h)(7)’s citation requirement implicitly demands accurate citations — citing to nothing, or to the wrong case, defeats the purpose of the rule and shifts the research burden onto the court.

The court also stressed two aggravating points:

• Cole’s pro se status didn’t excuse compliance with the rules, and pro se status doesn’t earn him extra leniency (citing People v. Shunick, 2024 IL 129244).
• Cole had a documented pattern — the opinion lists eight other appeals where he’d committed similar Rule 341 violations, two of which had already resulted in stricken briefs and dismissed appeals.

Given that history, the court treated this as a case where striking the brief and dismissing the appeal (an admittedly “drastic” remedy per Hall v. Naper Gold Hospitality) was warranted, citing Ammar v. Schiller, DuCanto & Fleck, LLP as support for that outcome given repeated, escalating noncompliance.

Rule 341(h)(7) citation accuracy isn’t a formality — courts treat fabricated or unsupported legal propositions as substantively undermining the entire brief, not just a technical defect in one section. This looks like a case where a pro se litigant used AI to create a brief and the AI struggled.