The Defendant Has a New Target: the Plaintiff's Law Firm.

The complaint starts with a conflict in the records

The City's case is unusually specific at the pleading stage. It identifies 15 matters in which notices of claim or complaints allegedly blamed potholes and other roadway defects while ambulance or hospital records described fights, hit-and-run crashes, opened car doors, or other causes. The complaint alleges that lawyers possessed those medical records, used medical details from them in filings, and nevertheless advanced a different account of causation. It also alleges that matters were discontinued after the contradictions surfaced.

Those assertions are serious because they concern more than an injured client's uncertain memory. The City says verified filings and demands for payment repeated narratives the lawyers allegedly knew were false. It characterizes the notices of claim as both demands covered by state and city false-claims laws and mail or wire fraud predicates supporting federal RICO counts.

The defendants have not answered in the public record described here, and the complaint has not been tested by motion practice, discovery, or trial. Counsel for the firm told Reuters that the allegations are baseless and that the suit mischaracterizes ordinary, contested personal injury litigation. That posture must remain visible. A complaint can organize allegations powerfully. It does not establish them.

The hard question is where contradiction ends and fraud begins. Emergency records can be incomplete. Patients can be confused. Later investigation can reveal a roadway defect that an initial history missed. Lawyers may plead on information and belief while evidence develops. None of that licenses a knowingly false account. It does mean that inconsistency, falsity, knowledge, and a scheme are different propositions that require different proof.

RICO changes the geometry of the case

An ordinary defendant attacks an ordinary claim by disputing duty, causation, damages, or credibility. It may seek sanctions, fees, fraud remedies, or referral to disciplinary or criminal authorities when the record warrants them. A civil RICO plaintiff does something broader. It alleges a person conducting an enterprise through a pattern of specified criminal acts and seeks relief for business or property injury caused by that violation.

The civil remedy is designed to be consequential. Section 1964(c) provides for threefold damages, costs, and a reasonable attorney's fee for a qualifying private plaintiff. Enterprise and conspiracy allegations can also expand the factual map beyond one pleading or one client. Referral sources, employees, medical providers, funders, communications, and other matters may become subjects of discovery because the theory depends on relationship and repetition.

That is the strategic power of the claim. The defendant in the underlying tort suit becomes the plaintiff in a federal action. The plaintiffs' firm becomes a defendant. The original claimant's injury can become one data point in an alleged system. Even if the RICO case ultimately fails, the law firm's case-development process, economics, and professional relationships may be examined under the premise that they form an enterprise.

The same power explains why precision is essential. A litigation practice is an organization, but organization is not racketeering. Repeated filings are a pattern of legal work, but repetition alone is not a pattern of racketeering activity. Funding supports litigation, but funding does not establish knowledge of a false claim. RICO cannot do the analytical work simply because its vocabulary makes the alleged conduct sound coordinated.

Another court drew a boundary around petitioning

The line is already being litigated. Ford sued Knight Law Group and others in 2025, alleging a fraudulent scheme involving lemon-law cases and fee requests. In November 2025, a federal judge dismissed the amended RICO claims with leave to amend. The court held that the challenged litigation activity was protected petitioning under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine and that Ford had not plausibly pleaded the sham-litigation exception. It also found the alleged RICO enterprise deficient.

That dismissal did not find that every billing entry was accurate or immunize lawyers from fraud. It held that Ford's pleaded theory had not crossed the legal thresholds required to transform litigation into racketeering. Ford appealed, and the appellate outcome could change or refine the analysis.

The Supreme Court's sham-litigation framework is demanding. Professional Real Estate Investors holds that litigation is not stripped of petitioning protection as a sham unless it is objectively baseless. Only after that objective inquiry does improper subjective purpose become relevant. The doctrine arose in antitrust law, and lower courts continue to work through how it applies to RICO theories built from court filings and related advocacy.

The Asher case is not identical. The City's theory emphasizes presuit notices demanding payment, alleged factual fabrication, and false-claims statutes, not merely unsuccessful courtroom advocacy. Whether those distinctions are legally sufficient will depend on the allegations, governing Second Circuit law, and the developed record. The useful point is narrower: calling an underlying claim fraudulent does not automatically make filing it a federal racketeering predicate. The path from disputed case to RICO case has elements, defenses, and causation requirements of its own.

The operational lesson is not to distrust every client

A defensive response to this trend could easily become destructive. Plaintiffs' lawyers often meet clients at the least orderly moment in their lives. Records conflict. Trauma affects recall. Police, ambulance, and hospital notes may capture different fragments. If firms treat every inconsistency as deceit, meritorious clients will lose counsel and early records will gain authority they do not always deserve.

The better control is reconciliation, not reflexive disbelief. When the asserted mechanism of injury conflicts with a contemporaneous record, someone with legal judgment should identify the conflict, ask a neutral follow-up, seek corroborating evidence, and document why the firm accepts, narrows, or rejects the claim. The same discipline should apply before an attorney verifies a complaint, signs a notice seeking public money, or submits a sworn factual account.

Source relationships deserve equal attention. Firms should be able to explain how a client arrived, what a runner or marketing vendor did, who pays case expenses, what a funder knows, and whether compensation creates pressure to preserve a narrative after evidence changes. These are not admissions that the participants form an enterprise. They are basic controls against divided incentives and facts moving through a pipeline without an accountable lawyer stopping to test them.

Discontinuance also needs a record. Ending a weak case can be responsible lawyering. But when a matter closes immediately after a contradiction is raised, silence invites competing explanations. A privileged internal assessment of the evidentiary change, the advice given, and the reason for dismissal can help distinguish correction from concealment. Documentation should record judgment, not manufacture a defense after the fact.

Fraud enforcement and access to counsel can both matter

There is no professional virtue in shielding fabricated claims. False filings impose real costs on public entities, businesses, courts, opposing parties, and legitimate claimants whose cases are met with greater suspicion. If the City's allegations are proved, the conduct should not be excused as zealous advocacy.

There is also no virtue in using the possibility of fraud to treat an entire category of representation as presumptively criminal. A RICO complaint can impose costs and reputational damage before a merits determination, particularly on a small firm. When the alleged predicates are litigation acts, courts must distinguish between a knowingly fabricated demand and an arguable claim that lost, changed, or contained conflicting evidence.

Reuters reported on October 9 that Milbank is now defending at least three law-firm RICO matters and described similar suits by corporations against plaintiffs' firms. That makes this more than one sensational complaint. It is an emerging litigation strategy with a developing defense bar and a growing body of threshold decisions.

The profession should resist choosing a slogan. RICO is neither automatically an abuse nor a truth machine. The statute can reach an actual pattern of fraud. It can also magnify an over pleaded dispute. The answer lies in element-by-element proof: what was false, who knew it, when they knew it, which communication was a predicate act, what enterprise existed apart from the conduct, and what injury the alleged violation caused. Before the plaintiff's lawyer becomes the defendant, those questions should remain harder than the accusation.

A law firm is not a racketeering enterprise merely because it files many contested cases. A fraud case must prove the difference.