I recently got retained to defend what appeared to me to be a bogus Statement of Claim. By bogus, I mean it had little to no chance of success. The plaintiff had issued the claim himself and was unrepresented by a lawyer.
I did a quick online search of the plaintiff’s name on the Ontario Superior Court’s data base and found that he had sixteen other cases where he was suing someone and another sixteen over the last twenty years where he was also suing someone. Based on that I suspected that he was a “professional plaintiff” and so advised my client.
What is a professional plaintiff? Well, it is a person who sues someone else knowing that their case doesn’t really have much chance of success with the hope of extracting some out of court payment from the defendant to drop the lawsuit. They know that it will cost the defendant much more money to pay a lawyer to defend the claim than to pay the plaintiff some nuisance value amount to go away. And more often than not, the defendant does pay the plaintiff to drop the claim.
In many cases, the professional plaintiff makes his or her living off of bogus lawsuits. I’ve come across people who have never worked a day in their life, and their only source of income over the last twenty years is from lawsuits. The best way to protect yourself from a claim by a professional plaintiff is not to hold any property in your name. Once the professional plaintiff realizes that you have no assets and that pursuing a claim against you is only going to leave him out of pocket, and possibly liable to you for costs of the proceeding, a professional plaintiff will usually fold like a cheap suit.
If you ‘ve transferred your assets to an Offshore Asset Protection Trust, then legally you do not own any property and that will often be enough to scare off the professional plaintiff from pursuing claim against you.
If you’ve been the victim of a professional plaintiff and want to know more click here