Lawyer gets interim suspension for alleged 'copy and paste' suits; federal judge had blasted tactics
Pavel Ignatov/Shutterstock.com.
A Phoenix lawyer has been placed on interim suspension while the State Bar of Arizona investigates complaints about his filing of more than 1,800 lawsuits against businesses for alleged violations of federal and state laws protecting people with disabilities.
Peter Strojnik was placed on interim suspension effective July 11, state bar press release, the Arizona Republic and ABC15.
Strojnik collected about $1.2 million in settlements in the cases, consisting primarily of attorney fees, according to the release. He would usually demand $5,000 in attorney fees.
A lawyer with the Arizona attorney general’s office had testified that the suits were “copy and paste” and made false allegations. Strojnik initially said he conducted thorough investigations before filing suit, but later admitted that many of the individuals who did the investigative work had been hired from Craigslist, the state bar says.
A district court had called Strojnik’s tactics extortionate, according to the press release. That wording was used by Senior U.S. District Judge Neil Wake in a Sept. 5 order dismissing Strojnik’s suit against MidFirst Bank and refusing to remand the case to state court, where it was originally filed.
Wake had concluded there was no standing to sue by an individual plaintiff and by a co-plaintiff, a group called Advocates for Individuals with Disabilities. Strojnik effectively conceded there was no standing by the individual plaintiff but argued unsuccessfully that the group still had standing.
The suit had accused MidFirst of failing to have adequate parking spaces and signage required by state and federal disability laws. The complaint didn’t state how the individual plaintiff in the case is disabled or how he was denied access to MidFirst facilities, Wake said.
MidFirst had immediately corrected the deficiencies but the lawyers still sought attorney fees of at least $5,000. Such tactics force the defendants to retain counsel or pay the money demanded. “This extortionate practice has become pervasive,” Wake said, He cited 160 federal lawsuits and more than 1,700 state lawsuits with the same individual plaintiff and the same or similarly named organizations as a co-plaintiff.
“The pleadings here follow the same script recited in other complaints right down to the same typographical errors,” Wake said. “Template complaints filled with non-specific allegations have become the stock-in-trade of attorneys Peter Strojnik” and his co-counsel, Wake said.
He noted the state court had decided there was no standing in more than 1,000 substantially similar cases.
Strojnik had argued that the state law gave standing to any person on the planet for disability law violations, including a Sherpa in Tibet. The state, however, amended the law to give standing to any “aggrieved person,” which meant the disability group could not sue. The revised state law also requires written notice and an opportunity to cure violations before a lawsuit is filed.
Related article:
ABAJournal.com: “Arizona AG asks for mass dismissal of multiple ADA cases; calls lawyer’s tactics ‘systemic abuse’ ”
