Ford RICO Lawsuit Against Lemon Law Attorneys: Two Dismissals

The Ford RICO lawsuit against California lemon law attorneys ended in March 2026, when a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed the case for good on First Amendment grounds. Judge Michelle Williams Court ruled that the attorneys’ fee petitions were protected petitioning activity under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, and that Ford could not use the federal racketeering statute to attack them, no matter how the billing entries looked. The court never decided whether the billing was actually fraudulent.¹

What Ford Accused the Lawyers Of

Ford filed the complaint on May 21, 2025 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging that a group of consumer lemon law attorneys had submitted more than $100 million in inflated and fabricated legal bills over roughly a decade.² The claims were tied to California’s Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act, which requires automakers to pay the legal fees of consumers who win warranty cases. Ford argued the defendants had systematically abused that fee-shifting mechanism across more than 5,000 warranty cases filed against the company since 2015, and that roughly half of the fees sought or collected were fraudulent.³

The complaint catalogued billing entries Ford said were physically impossible. Attorney Amy Morse had billed 57.5 hours on a single day in November 2016 and exceeded 24 hours on 34 separate occasions, Ford alleged. Richard Wirtz was said to have billed 29 hours on a single day in July 2018 by claiming to attend trials in both Alameda County and Los Angeles County, about 400 miles apart.³

Ford called Knight Law Group founding partner Steve Mikhov the “ringleader” of the alleged enterprise. According to the complaint, Mikhov did not personally try cases but ran marketing and operations, associating with other lawyers to provide trial services and splitting inflated fee awards with them. Ford said he submitted more than 1,200 hours of billing entries with no date listed, totaling over $625,000 in fees, and on one day in July 2017 billed 18.1 hours spread across 84 separate entries in 59 cases.³ Ford also alleged overstaffing of simple warranty cases with multiple co-counsel and the use of vague task descriptions like “unspecified legal research” to conceal time entries.⁴

Who Was Sued

The suit named nine defendants across three firms. The primary target was Knight Law Group LLP, a Los Angeles consumer-rights firm specializing in automotive lemon law. Also named were The Altman Law Group and Wirtz Law APC. Individual defendants included Mikhov, Knight Law partners Amy Morse and Roger Kirnos, former paralegal Dorothy Becerra, Altman Law Group founder Bryan C. Altman, and Wirtz Law founder Richard M. Wirtz. Ford sought treble damages under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act along with declaratory relief barring the defendants from collecting or retaining improperly obtained fees.³

Why the Case Failed

The case collapsed on a doctrine that has nothing to do with whether the billing entries were real. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine, built out of a line of Supreme Court decisions, shields private parties from federal liability for exercising the First Amendment right to petition the government. Filing lawsuits and seeking court-ordered attorney fees are both treated as protected petitioning.

Ford argued that submitting fake billing records is fraud, not petitioning, and should not qualify for that protection. The defendants argued that fee applications are an inherent part of litigation and that opening them to RICO attacks would expose any lawyer who files a fee petition to potential racketeering liability. At the November 2025 hearing, Knight Law’s lead attorney Neal Katyal called the RICO claim a “thermonuclear device” and warned it would signal to consumer attorneys nationwide that “winning a case could expose them to treble-damages attacks over their fees.” Katyal also argued Ford was relitigating fee disputes it had already lost in state court: “All this has been litigated for over a decade. They lost, and now want to do it all over again for treble damages.”⁵

The court sided with the defense. Judge Court held that the threshold question was whether Ford’s suit burdened the defendants’ petitioning rights, not whether the underlying conduct was “fraudulent and abusive.” The doctrine does carry a “sham” exception for petitions that are objectively baseless, but the judge found the underlying lemon law cases did not meet that threshold, so the exception did not apply.⁶ She separately found Ford had not adequately pleaded a RICO enterprise, writing, “Without more, this court will not turn an ordinary business relationship into a RICO enterprise.”⁷

Two Dismissals

The first dismissal came on November 24, 2025, with leave to amend.⁶ Ford came back with a narrower second amended complaint that dropped the Altman and Wirtz defendants and focused on three specific lawyers at Knight Law Group.⁸ It made no difference. On March 11, 2026, Judge Court dismissed the amended complaint without leave to amend, ruling that “defendants are entitled to Noerr-Pennington immunity for their petitioning activity, and dismissal is appropriate on this basis alone.” She again found Ford had failed to plead a RICO enterprise.¹ The docket was formally terminated, with a last filing recorded on April 23, 2026. As of mid-2026, no appeal by Ford has been publicly reported.⁹

What the Court Did Not Decide

The dismissal left Ford’s factual allegations untested. The judge did not find that Amy Morse worked 57.5 hours in a day, and she did not find that she didn’t. The 5,000 warranty cases, the $100 million figure, the duplicate billing, the undated entries attributed to Mikhov: none of that was resolved on the merits. The ruling was about the vehicle, not the driving. RICO, the court concluded, was not the right tool for challenging attorney fee petitions submitted to state courts, and that was enough to end the case without ever weighing the numbers.⁶

1
Milbank LLP. Milbank Successfully Defends Knight Law Group in Pivotal RICO Suit
2
CourtListener. Ford Motor Company v. Knight Law Group LLP
3
Courthouse News Service. Ford Motor Company v. Knight Law Group LLP, Complaint
4
Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP. On Behalf of Ford, Kasowitz Brings Civil RICO Case Against Lawyers Whose Bills Claim They Worked Up to 57.5 Hours in One Day
5
Courthouse News Service. Lemon Law Attorneys Seek to Dismiss Ford’s Racketeering Lawsuit
6
ALM Media. Ford Lemon Law Dismissal Order
7
The Recorder. Judge Slams Brakes on Ford’s RICO Suit Against Lemon Law Lawyers
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Law.com. Ford’s RICO Case Against Lemon Law Firm Comes to a Screeching Halt
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Bloomberg Law. Ford RICO Lawsuit Over Los Angeles Lawyers’ Billing Thrown Out