PHILADELPHIA (CN) - A leading air-crash litigation attorney's dispute with The Reason Foundation and the OverLawyered blog just got a lot uglier. Arthur Wolk claims he's been targeted in a vicious smear campaign by a cabal of far-right proponents of tort reform.
Wolk says the "unrelenting character assassinations" were coordinated by the "anti-consumer, anti-government, anti-court, anti-judge and often anti-Semitic, anarchistic" California-based Reason Foundation.
Wolk says he's been targeted because of his status as a high-profile attorney pursuing big awards in the type of tort-liability cases that groups such as The Reason Foundation just can't stand.
Defendants OverLawyered.com, The Reason Foundation and The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research carried out the Internet hit job "to discredit plaintiff at the Bar" and "to enact tort reform by getting rid of the proponents of tort liability, the plaintiff being in the forefront," Wolk says in his libel complaint in the Court of Common Pleas.
Wolk says that OverLawyered.com, a blog operated "for the benefit of ultra right wing organizations," defamed him by questioning his ethics and competency as an attorney.
OverLawyered describes itself as a site that "explores an American legal system that too often turns litigation into a weapon against guilty and innocent alike, erodes individual responsibility, rewards sharp practice, enriches its participants at the public's expense, and resists even modest efforts at reform and accountability."
Wolk says Reason and OverLawyered, led by OverLawyered's founder-defendant Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, formed an "Internet tag team" to publish defamatory statements about attorneys who do not subscribe to their far-right views, hoping to "whip up a frenzy to prove their dedication to the causes of the Libertarian party, much like the Nazis of the early 1930's."
The Cato Institute and The Reason Foundation, which publishes "Reason" magazine, are both Libertarian purists at heart.
To further their goal, Reason "has created a multi-media collaboration of journalist wannabees, news anchor wannabees and intellectual wannabees for the sole purpose of fostering ... whatever is the ultra right wing super rich agenda of the moment," Wolk claims in his 100-page pro se complaint.
Wolk says his ordeal began around April 2009, after he returned from a Continuing Legal Education class, where attorneys were told that running a Google search for their names was worth the effort.
Wolk, a 67-year-old father of two, says he took that advice, and uncovered an article posted in April 2007 by OverLawyered's "putative scholars" questioning whether he had a conflict of interest when a settlement was negotiated in a client's case.
As Wolk says he didn't have a hand in the settlement negotiations because they were handled by the client's other attorneys, he demanded that the inaccurate article be removed.
He says OverLawyered refused, even though two other attorneys involved in the case wrote to OverLawyered's counsel to attest to the falsity of the post.
Not only did OverLawyered refuse to remove the post, it "made certain that their false blog was picked up with even more vitriolic commentary by the Reason defendants and a myriad of other hate groups who are associated with them as an internet bullying tag team," Wolk claims.
In his complaint filed this week, Wolk says he first sued in the same court around August 2009. (There are discrepancies concerning the filing date of the original suit. Wolk says August 2009; court records show other dates.)