Kimberly Jean Brown v. Scott Gartner

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Submitted December 20, 2023 *
Decided December 21, 2023
Before
DIANE S. SYKES, Chief Judge
CANDACE JACKSON-AKIWUMI, Circuit Judge
JOHN Z. LEE, Circuit Judge
No. 23-1780
KIMBERLY JEAN BROWN,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
SCOTT GARTNER, et al.,
Defendants-Appellees.
Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Northern District of
Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 20-cv-05195
Andrea R. Wood,
Judge.
O R D E R
Kimberly Brown, who sued her former attorneys and their law firms for
malpractice, appeals the district court’s judgment dismissing her case for lack of
diversity jurisdiction. The court found that diversity of citizenship was lacking because
* We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and
record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not
significantly aid the court. FED. R. A PP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with FED. R. A PP. P. 32.1

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No. 23-1780 Page 2
Brown, like the defendants, is an Illinois citizen. This ruling was an appropriate exercise
of the court’s discretion, so we affirm.
Brown was a longtime resident of Illinois. She has maintained a law license there
since 1995 (continuously listing an Illinois address) and was registered to vote in
Chicago as late as 2018. In spring 2018 Brown hired Adam Kingsley and Scott Gartner
to represent her in a breach-of-contract suit in Illinois state court against a home-
renovation company. At the time, Brown, Kingsley, and Gartner all lived and worked in
Illinois. But over the next year, Brown alleged, her relationship with her attorneys
soured. She alleged that Kingsley urged her to settle for an unacceptable amount, and
that Gartner negotiated a settlement and dismissed the case without her authorization.
Meanwhile, Brown says she “fled”1 Illinois in August 2018 and spent the next six
months living in hotels and with friends and family across the country. In
February 2019, she settled in North Carolina, where she rented a home and obtained a
North Carolina driver’s license. Brown also terminated a rental agreement on a storage
locker in Illinois and moved all her furniture to North Carolina. (She now asserts that
she started a business there.) But her time in North Carolina was short-lived; in June or
July 2019, she says, she no longer could afford rent, and over the next year she lived in
RVs or stayed with friends and family across the country. She did, however, keep all
her furniture in a storage locker in North Carolina until she could no longer afford to do
so, eventually donating the furniture to a charity in North Carolina.
In July 2020, Brown returned to Chicago to see her terminally ill father and help
her mother sort out his affairs after he died. She asserts that she stayed at her parents’
home, sleeping on the floor of their office.
In September 2020, Brown brought this diversity suit in federal court against
Kingsley, Gartner, and their law firms for legal malpractice, breach of contract, and
negligent infliction of emotional distress. See 28 U.S.C. § 1332. Brown believed that
diversity existed because she was a citizen of North Carolina while the defendants were
all citizens of Illinois. The defendants moved to dismiss the suit under Rule 12(b)(1) of
the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, arguing, as relevant on appeal, that there was no
diversity of citizenship because Brown was a citizen of Illinois.
1 In her appellate brief, Brown asserts for the first time that her departure was
prompted by unspecified threats to her health and welfare in Illinois.

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No. 23-1780 Page 3
After allowing limited discovery on the jurisdictional question, the district court
granted the defendants’ Rule 12(b)(1) motion to dismiss for lack of diversity. Even
though Brown’s complaint satisfied the amount-in-controversy requirement, the judge
concluded that Brown was a citizen of Illinois, highlighting the Chicago address she
listed on her complaint, the tax return that she filed in Illinois for 2019, and her Illinois
law license (which she renewed and, even after 2018, continued to list an Illinois
address). The district court also found persuasive Brown’s longstanding familial ties to
Chicago and emphasized her conduct after filing the complaint—she wrote an email in
August 2021 to her employer which suggested that she considered Illinois her home
and did, in fact, permanently settle in Illinois.
On appeal, Brown challenges the district court’s determination that she was
domiciled in Illinois when she filed her complaint in September 2020. She asserts that
the court exaggerated her ties to Illinois and minimized those to North Carolina by
relying on events that post-dated her complaint and ignoring evidence of her lack of
intent to reside in Illinois. She insists that she intended to stay in Illinois only
temporarily to help her mother and points to her North Carolina driver’s license as
proof of an intent to return to North Carolina.
Because issues of fact predominate the question of an individual’s citizenship, we
review the court’s ruling under the highly deferential clear-error standard. Galva
Foundry Co. v. Heiden, 924 F.2d 729, 729–30 (7th Cir. 1991). Citizenship, for purposes of
§ 1332, is equated with domicile, and an individual establishes a domicile when they
physically reside in a state while simultaneously intending to remain there indefinitely.
Sadat v. Mertes, 615 F.2d 1176, 1180 (7th Cir. 1980). Factors indicating a party’s intent
include voter and vehicle registrations, driver’s or professional licenses, location of
property, relationships, and tax filings. See Galva Foundry Co., 924 F.2d at 730; Toulon v.
Cont’l Cas. Co., 877 F.3d 725, 733 (7th Cir. 2017).
The district court did not clearly err in concluding that Brown was domiciled in
Illinois at the time she filed this suit. Sufficient evidence in the record reflects that, upon
her return to Illinois in July 2020, Brown intended to remain there indefinitely. As the
court pointed out, she maintained for years an Illinois law license that listed a Chicago
address, was registered to vote in Illinois, had familial ties to the state, and paid her
2019 taxes there. Regarding the last example, Brown counters that she filed her 2019
taxes after she filed her complaint, but this overlooks the larger point that for tax
purposes she treated Illinois as her home for the year 2019. To the extent Brown asks us

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No. 23-1780 Page 4
to reweigh this evidence in her favor, we may not do so under the clear error standard
of review. See Allen v. City of Chicago, 865 F.3d 936, 945 (7th Cir. 2017).
Brown also contends that the district court improperly considered events after
she filed suit to determine her domicile—her exchange of emails with an employer in
August 2021 and the fact that she continued to reside in Illinois after filing her
complaint. But even if courts ought to adhere strictly to the rule that jurisdiction
“depends upon the state of things at the time of the action brought,” Grupo Dataflux v.
Atlas Glob. Grp., L.P., 541 U.S. 567, 570 (2004), the weight of the pre-filing evidence
persuades us that the court did not clearly err in determining that Brown was a
domiciliary of Illinois when she filed this suit.
AFFIRMED

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