Tim Capowski coined "Fraudemic" to describe what his firm bio calls the largest insurance fraud in U.S. history. The label has done a lot of work. Behind it now sits a growing public archive of carrier RICO complaints, a CLM conference panel slot, and a mid-year read that separates the rhetoric from the trajectory.
Tim Capowski, a partner at Kahana Feld and head of its National Appellate Litigation & Consulting Group, coined the word "Fraudemic" to describe what his firm bio calls "the largest insurance fraud in U.S. history." The label has done a lot of work since. It now sits behind a body of plaintiff-style complaints filed by insurance carriers in federal court, a growing public archive of those filings, and a panel slot at the 2026 Claims and Litigation Management Annual Conference titled "Stronger Together: Time to Collaborate on Defense Strategies."
The doctrine those filings rely on is not new. Civil RICO sat in the carrier toolbox for years, dormant except in staged-accident cases out of the Eastern District of New York. What changed is the cataloguing. The Kahana Feld Appellate Toolbox now publishes a year-by-year archive of New York federal RICO fraud complaints and indictments against plaintiff attorneys and medical professionals running from 2012 through 2026. That archive is the closest thing the carrier bar has to a scoreboard, and a mid-year read of it gives the clearest picture of where the offense is and is not landing.
Two Capowski pieces in the Appellate Toolbox set the floor for any current discussion of carrier-side offense. The first is "The Sunlight Disinfectant Principle: Transparency & Full Disclosure Are Necessary Safeguards for Consumer Litigation Funding," published in January 2024. Capowski's thesis in that piece, per the title and the firm's framing of his litigation-funding work, is that mandatory disclosure of third-party funders is itself a defensive measure that exposes the economic engine plaintiff firms otherwise keep off the record. He does not argue for RICO directly in that piece. He argues for the precondition that makes a RICO theory pleadable, which is the ability to identify who is paying for the claim and on what terms.
The second is his December 2022 piece, "The Snake Attack Phenomenon: The Courts Must Stop Overlooking and Facilitating The Continued Poisoning of Our Jury System." That article, again per its title, treats coordinated plaintiff tactics as a systemic problem the bench has been too slow to identify. The Snake Attack frame and the Fraudemic frame share an assumption Capowski has been explicit about: the plaintiff side has industrialized, and isolated case-by-case defense will not match it. Every reference in this article to Capowski's framing rests on those two published pieces and his bio's own description of his Fraudemic coinage. Nothing here is original CaseGlide doctrine.
A scoreboard read of the Toolbox archive shows three repeat features in the New York federal RICO complaints Capowski's group tracks. They are worth naming because they are the test of whether a given carrier complaint is well-pleaded or aspirational.
Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.
First, the strongest carrier RICO complaints in the archive name specific clinics and specific runners alongside the law firm. A no-fault staged-accident ring is a closed loop, and the cases that survive motions to dismiss are the ones that close the loop on paper. Carrier complaints that name only the firm and gesture at "co-conspirators to be identified" run into pleading-particularity walls under Rule 9(b). The Toolbox's 2024 and 2025 entries are heavy on the co-defendant clinic and the named-physician model. The 2026 entries follow the same pattern.
Second, the predicate-acts list almost always anchors on mail and wire fraud tied to claim submissions. That is mechanical. What is not mechanical is the pattern element. Carrier complaints that succeed plead a multi-year pattern with a count of submitted claims and a dollar total. The complaints that fail are the ones that plead one big number without the underlying claim-by-claim count.
Third, the venue is concentrated. EDNY remains the dominant home for these filings, with SDNY second. Federal courts outside New York have seen scattered filings, but the doctrine and the bench's familiarity with no-fault fraud both live in the EDNY. That concentration is itself a strategic signal. A carrier weighing a RICO offense in a non-New York venue is weighing a venue that has not yet been trained on the theory.
The most useful thing the scoreboard does is separate the rhetoric from the trajectory. Capowski's Fraudemic framing is rhetorically aggressive, and that framing has done a lot to shift the conversation at conferences like CLM. The actual filed-case curve is steadier than the rhetoric. Carrier RICO complaints have been filed in measurable numbers every year since 2012 per the Toolbox archive, and the case mix continues to skew toward no-fault and staged-accident rings rather than general personal-injury practices.
The strategic implication for a claims operation watching this from the outside is narrower than the conference-panel framing suggests. The cases that get filed are the cases where investigators have already mapped the clinic-runner-firm network. The cases that do not get filed are the ones where the carrier sees a suspicious volume from a single firm but has not done the network work. The scoreboard rewards the network work, not the headline.
The scoreboard rewards the network work, not the headline.
The next Capowski-tracked filing worth watching is the one that breaks out of EDNY and survives a 12(b)(6) motion in a venue that has not seen the theory before. Until then, the scoreboard reads as a doctrine still mostly concentrated in the place it was first proved.
The Executive Briefing is six questions. It shows you exactly where the gaps are.
Take the Executive Briefing →Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.