Greater New York Mutual brought a 207-page RICO complaint against Liakas Law. On June 15 the firm stood up in federal court and asked the judge to sanction the carrier's lawyers, the first real test of whether the offensive RICO weapon holds.
On June 15, in the Eastern District of New York, Liakas Law turned the gun around. The firm did not stand in front of the judge to defend a personal-injury client. It stood there as a defendant, and it asked the court to punish the company suing it. The company is Greater New York Mutual, an insurer. The weapon GNY brought was a 207-page federal racketeering complaint. Liakas called the carrier's filings a "copy-paste" abuse of the court.
That sentence is the whole story, and it has nothing to do with New York no-fault arcana. A carrier sued a law firm under RICO. The law firm counter-attacked in open court. It is the first time a named plaintiff firm has stood up and tried to sanction a carrier's offensive RICO playbook to its face. Every general counsel watching the defense-to-offense shift in litigation should watch what happens next.
Start with the flip itself. For decades the insurer was the defendant. A plaintiff firm filed, the carrier paid lawyers to defend, and the math of nuisance value did the rest. The cost of fighting exceeded the cost of settling, so carriers settled, and the plaintiff bar built a business model on that arithmetic. The RICO offensive inverts it. Instead of waiting to be sued, the carrier becomes the plaintiff. It alleges the firm and its medical and funding partners ran a coordinated enterprise to manufacture claims, and it asks for treble damages plus attorneys' fees. GNY's complaint against Liakas runs that exact playbook. The complaint reads the plaintiff firm not as an adversary in one case but as the head of a racket across many.
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This is the trend that belongs in front of a board. It is not a New York story. GEICO filed in the same district in May to recover a ten-million-dollar billing scheme, and again a day later to claw back money it had already paid and to declare it owed nothing on claims still pending. FedEx, which is not a carrier at all but a self-insured corporation, filed a 92-page racketeering complaint against a Brooklyn personal-injury attorney over staged crashes. The pattern is the same in each. A deep-pocket defendant decides it is cheaper to attack the source than to keep settling at the margin. Any company large enough to self-insure can now do what GNY is doing. That is why the GC, not just the chief claims officer, needs the brief.
A deep-pocket defendant decides it is cheaper to attack the source than to keep settling at the margin. Any company large enough to self-insure can now do this.
The Liakas hearing matters because it is the first real test of whether the weapon holds. The plaintiff bar has found its counter, and it is not subtle. Liakas's argument is that GNY's Texas counsel, the Willis Law Group, files the same complaint over and over with the names swapped, and that filing identical racketeering suits at scale is itself an abuse of process worth sanctions. The firm wants the court to make the carrier's lawyers pay for bringing the suit at all. If that lands, the offensive RICO model gets a price tag attached to every filing, and the math that made it attractive starts to wobble.
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There is a second crack the plaintiff bar is already working. In February the same Eastern District court threw out a nearly identical RICO suit, brought by Roosevelt Road Specialty against William Schwitzer & Associates, on standing. The court held the carrier was not the directly injured party, the Article III defect that has tripped these suits before. On June 15 the Schwitzer firm was back in court too, asking for fees. So the counter-attack has two prongs running at once. Sanction the carrier's lawyers for repetitive filings, and kill the suits on standing before they ever reach the merits. The weapon is real, but it keeps misfiring on the same defect, and the firms on the receiving end have learned exactly where to aim.
For a general counsel the read is direct. The offensive RICO suit is now a live tool against the firms that sue your company, and large self-insured corporations are using it, not just insurers. It is also unproven, expensive to bring, and vulnerable to a standing dismissal and a sanctions counterpunch that did not exist a year ago. The June 15 hearing is where both sides find out whose math wins. Whatever the EDNY rules, it will set the price of going on offense for every company watching.
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