An Illinois laundry-list records demand is not a Section 19 request
An Illinois laundry-list records demand is not a Section 19 request
2026-09-10 · Illinois · Courts
What happened. On March 21, 2025 the Illinois Appellate Court, First District, Fifth Division, affirmed a finding of no breach in Blue Ocean 21-1, L.L.C. v. Greenway Court Condominium Ass'n, 2025 IL App (1st) 232423-U. It is a Rule 23 order and is not precedential.1
The request was, in the court's words, “the proverbial 'laundry list' rather than one made with 'particularity' as the statute requires.”
The statutory framework
The court analysed the demand under 765 ILCS 605/19(a)(1)-(10), which enumerates the records an association must maintain and produce; 19(b), which requires a written request stating the records sought with particularity and a proper purpose; and 19(g), which sets out exemptions.
The derivative breach-of-fiduciary-duty count fell with the Section 19 count.
Two procedural facts that decided the appeal
The appellant filed a brief and no transcripts or bystander's report. Under settled Illinois law the appellate court cannot disturb a trial court's finding without a record of what happened below.
And the plaintiff was a former owner, still demanding records — as the court put it — “for years after the unit was disposed of by the member, possibly in a quest for statutory attorney fees.”
What a board may and may not do with this
May: refuse a blanket “produce everything for the last five years” demand. Illinois law does not require an association to answer one.
Should not: respond with silence. That is the mistake this case invites and it is a bad one. The safe response is a written refusal that identifies the particularity defect and invites a conforming request. A board that does that has a clean record and has usually resolved the dispute; a board that ignores the demand has a record showing only non-response, and will be arguing about particularity for the first time in front of a judge.
The distinction matters because Section 19 carries fee-shifting for a prevailing owner. The cost of answering properly is a letter; the cost of getting it wrong is the owner's fees plus your own.
What an owner can do
Itemise. Name the documents — “board meeting minutes for calendar 2025,” “the general ledger for the reserve account for fiscal 2024,” “the current management agreement” — rather than describing categories. State the proper purpose in a sentence. A request drafted that way is very hard to refuse and correspondingly easy to enforce.
The former-owner aside is a signal
Courts do not usually speculate about a litigant's motive. This one did, and the observation is worth reporting: an appellate panel noting that a former owner may be pursuing records “in a quest for statutory attorney fees” is a signal about how Illinois courts are reading the more aggressive end of the Section 19 docket.
It also raises a question the case did not decide — whether a former owner has Section 19 rights at all. The section speaks of members and unit owners. The court did not need to reach it, and no Illinois decision in this period does.
What the legislature nearly did instead
Two 2026 bills would have changed this landscape substantially and both died. HB 5617 would have required a free owner-accessible records portal and a right to photograph records at no cost — which would have made most particularity fights moot, because an owner with a download button does not need to describe what they want. HB 2648 would have capped charges at $375 with an itemized statement of the basis of every fee.
What passed instead was a website carrying meeting information and approved minutes by January 1, 2028. That is a small subset of Section 19's categories, and it does not touch the particularity requirement at all.
The other unresolved records question
Separately, the Illinois Supreme Court has taken up whether a seller can sue over Section 22.1 disclosure fees. That is the resale-package statute rather than Section 19, but the two are the pressure points in the same dispute about what associations may charge for paper.
What to watch next
No petition for leave to appeal was found. Whether a former owner may invoke Section 19 remains open in Illinois.
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