This (alleged) strategy might perhaps work for a while, but there's a serious risk of it all crashing down on you at some point.
Background: One well-known strategy was to file hundreds of separate unfair competition lawsuits against business owners in an attempt to obtain (extort?) small-scale attorney fee settlements from the defendants. That worked for a long while, but several previously successful lawyers ultimately lost their law licenses as a result.
Another well-known strategy is to do the same thing with serial lawsuits under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But that ultimately resulted in reactive measures against those participants as well, with some of them finding themselves criminally convicted.
Today's opinion from the Court of Appeal involves an (allegedly) similar strategy under the California Public Records Act. According to Justice Fields: "[The City of Corona]claimed that Kinney and Toraason were engaged in a “shakedown scheme” to collect thousands of dollars in attorney fees from numerous California public agencies based on denied requests for public records. According to City, the alleged “scheme” worked like this: A petitioner like Kinney would find an internet news article reporting a crime; the petitioner would send an e-mail to the public agency referenced in the article, requesting the name of the crime victim; when the agency denied the CPRA request “on the grounds that the information is privileged, confidential, exempt, or otherwise non-disclosable,” the petitioner would “immediately file” a “cookie-cutter” petition “accompanied by a request for a [filing] fee waiver” and asking the court to order the agency to pay the petitioner’s attorney fees. . . .
It is not clear when Kinney first made a “ransom” or monetary demand of City, but the record includes a February 15, 2020 e-mail from Higginbotham to Toraason, referencing a “settlement demand” from Kinney for $6,500. In the e-mail, Higginbotham said it was “preposterous” that Toraason could have incurred $6,500 in attorney time on the case at that point. . . .
At that point, Higginbotham believed Borchert, Toraason, Austin, and Kinney “were all complicit in a vast, statewide shakedown scheme, using the same cookie-cutter petition template, and substantially identical tactics. City claimed it discovered “a new variant on the scheme by which Austin would e-mail” CPRA requests from an e-mail-address “plainly calculated to trigger spam blockers . . . and thereby deprive public agencies of the opportunity to respond to the [CPRA] request until after a lawsuit had been filed and the ransom demanded.”"
Here, the lawyers get paid. But, after the Court of Appeal's reversal, only $2500, rather than the $43,000+ awarded by the trial court.
As I said, I suspect that (alleged) efforts like this work. Until they don't.
P.S. - I think it might be especially dangerous to try things like this with public entities. They have a lot of power. And they don't need to be economically rational in how they respond to demands that they believe are extortionate.
