Legal Question in Consumer Law in Ohio

In Ohio, there are two bases for the sort of relief you seek. The first is found in the Ohio Rules of Civil Procedure. Civil rule 11 states that before bringing a lawsuit or a cause of action the party and/or his attorney must investigate the facts diligently so as not to make any claims that the party or the attorney would know to be baseless. If a party to a lawsuit or an attorney in a lawsuit violates civil rule 11 the court can award sanctions against that party or attorney, and these could include attorney's fees or other actual damages if any.

The trouble with civil rule 11 is that it works on a subjective intent level. That means that the party or attorney must have known that his conduct was in violation of the rule. That can be a hard standard meet if you are the party bringing the civil rule 11 action against the other person. But it is by no means impossible to win on a civil rule 11 sanctions motion.

The second basis for the relief you seek is Ohio revised code 2323.51. This statute states that if a party or an attorney for that party files anything with the court that the party or the attorney for that party knew or should have known was baseless or was filed merely for the purposes of harassment or delay, then the party suffering damages from that can file a motion for sanctions under Ohio revised code 2323.51. The standard for such a motion is an objective standard and this makes it easier to win on these motions (although it is still difficult) because the standard is whether the other party or his attorney knew or should have known that the filing was baseless.

Either way can be difficult to win on these issues because the courts don't like to see anything that might have a chilling effect upon litigation and what gets filed. So you are going to have to show some fairly egregious conduct by the other side. Perhaps the best evidence of that would be several letters or emails from you to the other side indicating that you are not the person they are trying to sue and that you hope that they will remove you from the lawsuit without any need on your part to intervene.

If you can show the court that you were being reasonable and trying to work this out simply and efficiently, and that the other side was simply ignoring you then that might prompt the court to think a little harder about sanctioning the other side.