Proprietors of ethnic restaurants and auto repair shops across the state undoubtedly breathed a sigh of relief when California authorities put the Trevor Law Group out of business.
The Trevor lawyers were a clutch of Beverly Hills shakedown artists who perfected a technique that involved suing thousands of mom-and-pop businesses at a time -- some of their lawsuits listed 30,000 "John Doe" defendants -- for violating Section 17200 of the state's business and protection code, which imposes sanctions for unlawful, fraudulent or unfair business practices.
The lawyers would troll state agency Web sites for lists of alleged violations of small-business codes, such as restaurant hygiene infractions. They would sue the businesses on the lists, which are notoriously preliminary. Then they would contact the defendants with offers to settle for a few thousand dollars a pop. Since most of their victims didn't have the wherewithal to hire their own lawyers, and had little experience responding to formal legal complaints, this scam began to look like a new frontier in legal extortion and a distinctive California scourge, like medflies and recall campaigns.
Eventually, the Trevor gang attracted the attention of Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer and the State Bar of California. The latter filed a disbarment case that resulted in the resignation of the three Trevor lawyers from the bar earlier this month. (They resigned before the disbarment could be formally concluded, but they still face a lawsuit from Lockyer demanding restitution of all the settlement money they received.)
So that ended the problem, right?
Not quite. "There's no reason to think that the resignation of the Trevor lawyers will stop the shakedown," says Edward Sybesma, a lawyer at the Costa Mesa firm Rutan & Tucker whose defense against a Trevor lawsuit may have helped sink the firm.
Let's leave aside the fact that the State Bar has active cases against two other law firms accused of similar scams, and that ludicrous 17200 claims against small businesses materialize anew every day. (As I write I'm looking at a letter sent two weeks ago by a Bay Area lawyer to a San Jose pool company, offering to settle a potential 17200 claim over a supposedly deceptive newspaper advertisement in exchange for a "reasonable attorney's fee" of $5,000).
