The Indiana Trap: How Every RV Lawsuit Ends Up in Elkhart

There is a small town in northern Indiana that most Americans have never heard of. The population is roughly fifty thousand. The unemployment rate runs about half the national average. And if you have ever bought a new RV, there is a very good chance that the moment your problems started, you became a citizen of that town. You just did not know it. Welcome to Elkhart. Where the RV industry builds its products, hires its lawyers, and quietly relocates every legal dispute it ever wants to have. Whether or not you have ever set foot in the state.

Why Elkhart Matters

Four of every five RVs built in the United States come out of Elkhart County, Indiana. The industry employs more than eighty thousand people in the county alone. The local economy is built on the assumption that the RV business stays. The local courts have decades of experience with manufacturer side litigation. The jury pools are populated by neighbors and family of factory workers. Even when the buyer wins, the venue is loaded. That is exactly why the industry sends you there.

McAuley In Detail

In part one of this series I introduced Brennan McAuley and his Thor Tellaro. Here is the rest of the story. McAuley bought the camper van from Camping World in Virginia for ninety nine thousand dollars. Within two weeks, the engine failed and the steering locked up on an interstate. He filed suit against Camping World, Thor, and FCA in Virginia state court. Camping World was dismissed because the purchase contract contained a dealer warranty disclaimer and an implied warranty waiver that the court enforced. Thor and FCA invoked the forum selection clause in the warranty registration paperwork and moved to transfer the case to the Northern District of Indiana.

Federal Judge Henry E. Hudson granted the transfer in January 2024. McAuley's attorney, John Cole Gayle Jr. of the Consumer Law Group, co author of the Virginia Lemon Law, summarized the impact succinctly. "It's gonna be more cumbersome, more time consuming and more expensive." McAuley lost his choice of court. He lost his Virginia lemon law claim against Thor. He lost the jury trial right he had under his original contract. None of those losses had anything to do with the actual defects in his RV.

How A Forum Selection Clause Works

A forum selection clause is a contract term that picks the court in advance. It says that if you and the other party have a dispute, you have already agreed to litigate it in a specific place. The Supreme Court made these clauses extremely difficult to challenge in the 2013 case Atlantic Marine Construction Co. v. United States District Court. After Atlantic Marine, courts are required to enforce forum selection clauses except in very narrow circumstances. The RV industry took notice and built the Indiana forum selection clause into nearly every purchase agreement and warranty registration in the country.

The practical effect for an out of state buyer is brutal. You have to hire counsel in Indiana, or pay your local attorney to fly back and forth. You lose access to your home state lemon law, which in many states (California, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Texas) is stronger than Indiana law. You lose the trial procedures and evidence rules you were probably going to use. You travel. You miss work. You pay more. And you face a jury pool with a vested interest in the local industry.

Fifteen McAuleys At Once

When Virginia Lawyers Weekly profiled the McAuley case, defense attorney Soroush Moghaddassi at Harmon Claytor Corrigan and Wellman, who represents Thor in cases like this, made a remarkable disclosure. He said he was working on roughly fifteen active cases just like McAuley's at the same time. He said he had not seen this volume of cases before the pandemic. The implication is that the post 2020 RV boom flooded the field with defective product, and the forum selection machine is now processing the resulting lawsuits at scale. Moghaddassi also represents Jayco in similar federal cases in the Eastern District of Virginia.

This is the part of the story that does not get told. There is not one McAuley. There are dozens. Each one a person who handed over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, received a defective product, and found out only after the fact that the fight had already been arranged in a place they did not pick.

The California Rebuke

A few courts have refused to enforce these clauses. In January 2023, Judge Lorenz in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California denied Thor's motion to transfer an RV breach of warranty case to Indiana. Judge Lorenz wrote that Thor "knowingly presents agreements to California consumers containing clauses that are prohibited under California law" and called the practice "contrary to California public policy." The ruling is exactly the precedent buyer side attorneys have been waiting for. It also remains the exception. In Hardy v. Forest River, the California Court of Appeal in 2025 upheld a Los Angeles Superior Court decision that stayed a California Song Beverly Consumer Warranty Act case in favor of Indiana. Same state. Different judge. Different result.

What You Can Do About It

If you have not yet bought an RV, read every page of every document the dealer hands you. Cross out the forum selection clause and the jury trial waiver in front of the salesperson before you sign. If the dealer will not strike the clauses, walk away. There are other dealers. If you have already bought, your contract almost certainly contains these clauses, and you should know what you are facing if anything goes wrong. The Defense Kit I built for this series includes the exact language to look for, the legal authority to cite if you negotiate, and a list of attorneys who handle these cases.

Next Week

Part three of this series, publishing next week, is a forensic walkthrough of the five specific clauses in every RV purchase contract that quietly strip you of recourse. If you do not yet know exactly which clauses cost you what, this is the piece you need to read before you sign anything.