[Eugene Volokh] Lawsuit against lawyers who allegedly filed improper lawsuits aimed at getting Internet criticism deindexed by Google

Several days ago, noted Internet lawyer Marc Randazza and his colleagues filed a lawsuit alleging that various defendants were misusing the court system to try to get online criticism deindexed by Google and other search engines. This isn’t the scheme that Paul Alan Levy and I wrote about, though it allegedly has a similar aim: It involves lawsuits filed by real lawyers against real defendants, but the question is whether the defendants are at all related to the posts that they allegedly wrote and that the plaintiffs (or the people behind the plaintiffs) want to see hidden online. (The people at Pissed Consumer first alleged it earlier this year.)

Here are some excerpts from the complaint (or see the full complaint with the appendices, though it’s over 10 megabytes):

INTRODUCTION

1. This case involves a creative solution to a common frustration for many businesses, who do not like negative reviews that are published about them on the Internet. However, removing consumer reviews from the Internet is a difficult process given that they are protected by the First Amendment.

2. Nevada Corporate Headquarters, has gone to great lengths to attempt to suppress consumer reviews in the past. It has filed at least one SLAPP suit in Nevada seeking injunctive relief to censor those negative reviews. In that case, Nevada Corporate Headquarters suffered a resounding loss when they were hit with an anti-SLAPP order. . . . They also lost at summary judgment in a SLAPP-back suit. That action resulted in a significant judgment for attorney fees and costs. . . .

3. Undaunted by these set-backs, Nevada Corporate Headquarters has now conspired with other companies and individuals to create a scam whereby they suppress negative reviews from the Internet, while evading any First Amendment or due process considerations. This scam also allows them to avoid the risk of another anti-SLAPP attorney fee award.

4. Several other businesses and professionals who have been the subject of negative reviews online have also employed the same fraudulent machinery as Nevada Corporate Headquarters, as a means of removing this content while evading detection and liability.

5. The scam is not all that complicated. Google will remove search engine results from its well-known search engine if it is provided with a court order determining that the information is indeed defamatory.

6. However, when Nevada Corporate Headquarters sued consumer review websites in the past, it was severely disappointed. (See Exhibits 1 & 2.) Therefore, they needed to concoct a new censorship scam. So they used a stooge plaintiff, ZCS Inc. (“ZCS”), to sue a stooge defendant, Collins Mattos (“Mattos”).

7. Defendant Doe Corporations, so called “reputation management companies,” conceived and organized the scam as an alternative way to remove negative posts in lieu of undergoing an adversarial proceeding. Several other businesses and professionals have contacted these “reputation management companies,” which have used similar schemes to remove negative consumer reviews about them.

8. The other conspirators engaged attorneys Mark W. Lapham (“Lapham”) and Owen T. Mascott (“Mascott”) to file sham lawsuits either by the subjects of the negative reviews or by corporations that had no interest in the allegedly defamatory statements, against a defendant who most certainly was not the party that published the allegedly defamatory statements, and the parties immediately stipulated to a judgment of injunctive relief, so the conspirators could provide the order to Google and other search engines, thus achieving the goal of deindexing all pages containing negative reviews.

9. At first blush, Defendants’ scam appears rather brilliant but incredibly unethical. Now that Plaintiff has uncovered and exposed Defendants’ unlawful deeds, Consumer Opinion LLC respectfully requests that this Court discipline them for those misdeeds. . . .

11. There are four categories of Defendants in this scheme:

(1) the entities that file and/or benefit from the suit (the “Filing Defendants”); (2) the attorneys who knowingly and unethically file and prosecute these fraudulent lawsuits (the “Attorney Defendants”); (3) the “defendants” in these fake lawsuits who falsely claim to be the authors of allegedly defamatory statements (the “Stooge Defendants”); and (4) the “reputation management companies” that devised and carried out these schemes (the “RMC Defendants”). . . .

FACTS SUPPORTING CLAIMS