Judge shuts down opinion website.

Hobbes

http://www.joe.ie/news-politics/current-affairs/irish-judge-closes-opinion-website-saying-defamation-can-cause-suicide-0020292-1

Judge Michael Peart ordered rate-your-solicitor.com to be closed because it had defamed a Sligo solicitor, Declan Tansey. The action was against site operators and the US site host, Dostster Inc.

...

The 'mischief', as he called it, was so serious that the government should draft a new law to deal with defamatory material online.

Is this a follow on from the Irish SOPA? Or anything to be worried about?

Reading around I found this.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1118/1224307765426.html

So it appears because the moderators sat back and let anything be posted (anonymously) worked against them? Also not showing up in court?

nuac

This site was really OTT - deserved to be closed.

RandolphEsq

The guy who ran it was a crank and a busybody. The website was completely defamatory. It would be like me saying here that "Mr. X solicitor only cares about making money and will do the bare minimum in his work." It went beyond what is opinion.

Paulw

nuac wrote: »

This site was really OTT - deserved to be closed.

The site was never about rating a solicitor, but was about all negative comments about solicitors. Positive comments seem to be removed quicker than they could be posted. The site was never balanced nor fair.

pirelli

Hobbes wrote: »

http://www.joe.ie/news-politics/current-affairs/irish-judge-closes-opinion-website-saying-defamation-can-cause-suicide-0020292-1



Is this a follow on from the Irish SOPA? Or anything to be worried about?

Reading around I found this.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/1118/1224307765426.html

So it appears because the moderators sat back and let anything be posted (anonymously) worked against them? Also not showing up in court?

Finally!! Someone actually said something untrue and the lawyers got revenge. I had always thought in some instances the site's comments too extreme to be true, so why did it take so long for a would be army of lawyers that must be either terrible or terribly defamed lawyers to take so long to sue this site.

It was quoted in Tanseys case that the site receives a high volume of traffic from the legal profession. What took so long.

Hobbes

pirelli wrote: »

so long for a would be army of lawyers that must be either terrible or terribly defamed lawyers to take so long to sue this site.

According to the Irish Times article they had fake contact information. Some John Smith in Moscow, so they had to place a tracking image and get a warrant to get the IP information off eircom.

benway

Hobbes wrote: »

Is this a follow on from the Irish SOPA? Or anything to be worried about?

No and no.

The site was a joke, pretty much amounted to a haven for cranks and disgruntled litigants who came out on the losing side to vent - some of the comments were pretty shocking.

Interestingly, I made a couple of positive posts about solicitors I know a few years back, which never appeared, while the attack posts mounted up. So I don't think it's fair to say that there was no moderation policy whatsoever.

This is John Gill, the main Defendant:

blueythebear

pirelli wrote: »

Finally!! Someone actually said something untrue and the lawyers got revenge. I had always thought in some instances the site's comments too extreme to be true, so why did it take so long for a would be army of lawyers that must be either terrible or terribly defamed lawyers to take so long to sue this site.

It was quoted in Tanseys case that the site receives a high volume of traffic from the legal profession. What took so long.

I believe that it took so long because the relevant respondents to any action were very difficult to pin down. I think there was an American hosting company (Dotster inc) and 2 individuals.

There is also the issue of costs. As you are suing two individuals who were probably of limited means and a foreign company, it would be extremely difficult to obtain legal costs from them, never mind damages if he had actually sued for defamation.

So basically, the remarks had to be so damaging in Mr Tansey's eyes that he was willing to issue a High Court action with a very real risk of not realising his costs from the other side if he won. I believe at the time, that Tansey's tried to drum up interest from other solicitors in order to pool their resources to sue the site.

irishh_bob

ive written possitive and negative reviews on that site , of the solicitors featured which im familiar with , i have to say , most of the reviews were broadly speaking , representative of my own experience

n97 mini

Dotster didn't turn up presumably because the court has no jurisdiction over them.

pirelli

Hobbes wrote: »

According to the Irish Times article they had fake contact information. Some John Smith in Moscow, so they had to place a tracking image and get a warrant to get the IP information off eircom.

Sounds like a tough problem for solicitors...these types of problems require some serious know how. So they got an IP address of eircom, nice one.

blueythebear wrote: »

I believe that it took so long because the relevant respondents to any action were very difficult to pin down. I think there was an American hosting company (Dotster inc) and 2 individuals.

There is also the issue of costs. As you are suing two individuals who were probably of limited means and a foreign company, it would be extremely difficult to obtain legal costs from them, never mind damages if he had actually sued for defamation.

So basically, the remarks had to be so damaging in Mr Tansey's eyes that he was willing to issue a High Court action with a very real risk of not realising his costs from the other side if he won. I believe at the time, that Tansey's tried to drum up interest from other solicitors in order to pool their resources to sue the site.

I honestly sympathise but if it wasn't for the fact that it merely highlights how disintegrated and out of touch with the technology our legal profession is.

Rate your solicitor always had a conspiracy theory of how the legal profession was in the 'fold' with Garda and our politicians and other higher echelon's of irish society, so therefore at least the failure of intelligence by the legal profession to organise and trace the owner of the website does actually make me wonder if that is true or it might just highlight that the higher you go in the 'fold' the more they know about the inside of a brown envelope and the less the likes of Michael Lynn know about computer technology.

Intelligence sources in other countries can trace as much as a single word in a twitter post to a name and person. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/british-tourists-deported-for-tweeting_n_1242073.html

I know that it took 6 years for a brave legal professional to finally open his pocket and hopefully begin a stream that might pool enough money from the tightest pocket's in Ireland but let's wait and see if that happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Society_of_Ireland
A website launched in February 2006 by the Victims of the Legal Profession, www.Rate-Your-Solicitor.com has become an increasingly popular place for people to vent their frustrations with solicitors.

You have to acknowledge that it's popularity grew from people that have all had dealings with Irish solicitors and some barristers. The wiki does put things in perspective showing the times and attitudes that were not favourable to the legal profession.

blueythebear

pirelli wrote: »

I honestly sympathise but if it wasn't for the fact that it merely highlights how disintegrated and out of touch with the technology our legal profession is.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with you there. I don't believe it was the technical issues that caused a problem with tracing the owners of the site. It was the evidential and jurisdictional issues. In the case of a website operating out of another country, Ireland and that country must have some form of agreement to allow Irish authorities obtain personal information about the owners of the site. I'm not au fait with the whole thing but I imagine it's a similar situation to Swiss Bank Accounts, in that you might know that Joe Bloggs has 600million in a certain Swiss Bank Account, but if the Swiss bank won't confirm it, then you cannot prove it.

All of this just increases the time and effort you would need to take a case against rate-your-solicitor.com bringing the question back to whether it's actually worth the effort to sue them to try and get it shut down.

pirelli wrote: »

Rate your solicitor always had a conspiracy theory of how the legal profession was in the 'fold' with Garda and our politicians and other higher echelon's of irish society, so therefore at least the failure of intelligence by the legal profession to organise and trace the owner of the website does actually make me wonder if that is true or it might just highlight that the higher you go in the 'fold' the more they know about the inside of a brown envelope and the less the likes of Michael Lynn know about computer technology.

Intelligence sources in other countries can trace as much as a single word in a twitter post to a name and person. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/30/british-tourists-deported-for-tweeting_n_1242073.html

I know that it took 6 years for a brave legal professional to finally open his pocket and hopefully begin a stream that might pool enough money from the tightest pocket's in Ireland but let's wait and see if that happens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Society_of_Ireland
A website launched in February 2006 by the Victims of the Legal Profession, www.Rate-Your-Solicitor.com has become an increasingly popular place for people to vent their frustrations with solicitors.

You have to acknowledge that it's popularity grew from people that have all had dealings with Irish solicitors and some barristers. The wiki does put things in perspective showing the times and attitudes that were not favourable to the legal profession.

Lots of solicitors have been involved in very shady dealings in the past so there would be a grain fo truth in some of the posts, but I would still maintain that 90% of the negative posts on a site like that are from some busybody or crank who didn't win a case.

The average punter does not generally understand the law and a seemingly very simple case can actually be very complex. Not to mention that anything can happen in court on the day. When a client doesn't get the result they want, they can turn into these obsessive types who overanalyse their case to the Nth degree who get increasingly paranoid until they crack and then post the details on this website.

The views expressed on a website like that cannot be objective due to the serious nature of the issues that solicitors deal with. When it doesn't go right (and that can happen for a myriad of reasons), the client has to blame somebody, so the solicitor or judge or barrister gets all of the blame.

suemartin

Congrats to Damien

coylemj

pirelli wrote: »

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Society_of_Ireland
A website launched in February 2006 by the Victims of the Legal Profession, www.Rate-Your-Solicitor.com has become an increasingly popular place for people to vent their frustrations with solicitors.

You have to acknowledge that it's popularity grew from people that have all had dealings with Irish solicitors and some barristers. The wiki does put things in perspective showing the times and attitudes that were not favourable to the legal profession.

You were doing ok until you quoted something from Wikipedia.

In case you're not aware of how it works, you could have written the Wikipedia article yourself 5 minutes earlier, then copied & pasted it into your Boards post to bolster your case - not!

benway

blueythebear wrote: »

Lots of solicitors have been involved in very shady dealings in the past so there would be a grain fo truth in some of the posts, but I would still maintain that 90% of the negative posts on a site like that are from some busybody or crank who didn't win a case.

The average punter does not generally understand the law and a seemingly very simple case can actually be very complex. Not to mention that anything can happen in court on the day. When a client doesn't get the result they want, they can turn into these obsessive types who overanalyse their case to the Nth degree who get increasingly paranoid until they crack and then post the details on this website.

The views expressed on a website like that cannot be objective due to the serious nature of the issues that solicitors deal with. When it doesn't go right (and that can happen for a myriad of reasons), the client has to blame somebody, so the solicitor or judge or barrister gets all of the blame.

Nail:head. Very few of these guys are ever in the wrong about anything ... if a Court finds against them, it HAS to be a case of professional/judicial incompetence/corruption.

pirelli wrote:

Rate your solicitor always had a conspiracy theory of how the legal profession was in the 'fold' with Garda and our politicians and other higher echelon's of irish society

No-one's trying to suggest that all solicitors are squeaky clean, or anything like it, but RYS and its sister organisation the Victims of the Legal Profession Society took that ball and ran with it to a silly degree. Seemed to be populated to a large extent by the kind of people who issue JR proceedings against every judge they've ever appeared before, the Presidents of the District, Circuit and High Courts, the Chief Justice, the Taoiseach, the Tánaiste, Ireland, the Attorney General, and Michael McDowell.

The problem I always saw with them is that they tended to gee up people who may have had genuine grievances, and the possibility of a sensible resolution, with this stuff. Whatever about their personal crusades, was always unhappy to see them leading other people astray - remember once seeing one of their protegeés doing well in the Master's Court dealing with the specifics of her case, before one of the RYS/VLPS luminaries pulled her up started whispering in her ear about "corruption".

They had the affidavits and pleadings from some of these travesties of justice up on the Crooked Lawyers site, I read through quite a few of them and could never really make out what case they were trying to make and how they'd been wronged. Loads of their press releases are still up on indymedia though, you'll get the idea:

>John Gill is one of the most courageous and eloquent characters to grace an Irish Court since Daniel O'Connell.<

Just hope nobody ever lets slip about Fremenism to these guys.

Hobbes

coylemj wrote: »

In case you're not aware of how it works, you could have written the Wikipedia article yourself 5 minutes earlier, then copied & pasted it into your Boards post to bolster your case - not!

Except that Wikipedia keeps logs of everyone who touches a page. So had it been vandalism it can be spotted/tracked very fast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Law_Society_of_Ireland&action=history

Robbo

benway wrote: »

>John Gill is one of the most courageous and eloquent characters to grace an Irish Court since Daniel O'Connell.<

Just hope nobody ever lets slip about Fremenism to these guys.

When I saw that Jayne Mansfield had taken a libel action against him, tea came out my nose.

benway

Robbo wrote: »

When I saw that Jayne Mansfield had taken a libel action against him, tea came out my nose.

Snarky, ain't they?

Jayne Maguire BL was the plaintiff that time round, again the comments were extremely bad. If I recall correctly she discontinued the proceedings when Mr. Gill had the comments pulled from the site ... all the while maintaining that he had nothing to do with it.

nuac

RYS made atrocious comments about Ms Maguire. Those operating that site were completely irresponsible

Our man in Havana

The thing is he will probably set the site up again in a jurisdiction way outside the reach of the state who would simply ignore any court orders issued in Ireland or the EU.

CatherineMac

Hello all,

I just found this thread when googling for something in relation to these people (the VLPS) and after reading the thread, I joined boards.ie to fill the people on this thread in a little.

I, although not a solicitor (nor barrister, nor judge) have been the target of these people for six years now.

Why did they target me?

Well simply because they had written untrue and very nasty stuff about my husband who was a solicitor, I set up a blog to put the truth out there to counteract the negative things they wrote.

That I did this annoyed them intensely and they turned their full attention to me.

I have been called many things, all posted by them to try to hurt me. They have written the most vile personal jibes, something that someone less strong and secure might have found intolerable. At least I had the blog to write about these writings.

They have tried to undermine my holiday home which we let to guests. The house is a good house and we have never had a negative comment from guests but they have called it a "damp hovel" and a brothel among some of the better things they wrote.

They have written that they photographs us (me and my husband) a result of which that I, who was free and easy before and in truth rather lax about checking doors and windows were locked, now live behind locked gates, have had security sensor lights fitted around our house, and have had CCTV fitted. Being behind locked gates and not sure who is filmining or photographing you when you step outside of the security of home is not a pleasant thing to live with.

The stalk me on the net constantly, suggesting to people on their sites that they join certain boards to write nasty stuff about me (one of which they joined solely to send me a PM saying they know where my son lives), they put my twitter user name encouraging people to follow me, and much more.

So why not sue?

The first reason being John Gill is a registered bankrupt and therefore not worth suing. Incidentally, he totally ignored the ruling of Justice Michael Peart and continues to post on his guestbook, ripping in to Justice Peart.

The second being these people post on their sites using proxy ip addresses. The frustration of not having access to the true identity of these people writing lies about you is immense.

The third is that our laws are currently woefully inadequate in dealing with internet abuse and stalking.

However, last weekend I noticed they had targeted our baby granddaughter.

(I had been checking the ip addresses on their guestbook, IPs only having been added since January this year ~ a result no doubt of someone reporting them to the guestbook provider. On having a long check through I noticed that the same IP address came up time and again. I then found that one IP address poster had posted using 47 different names. Over 60% of said posts about me by the way!).

Back to our baby granddaughter. All their jibes about my looks and personality were at time hurtful, yes, but targeting the baby really infuriated me.

And that fury has kicked me into action and focused me on getting laws enacted in Ireland whereby people cannot hide behind proxy ips to defame and hurt others.

My posting here is not to garner sympathy nor to promote my blog (I have not even added a link to it in my profile), it is to let people see how bad being stalked and abused on the internet is and just how easy it is to get away with, even if you could sue with no legal costs (as in our case).

It is time that people were protected from people writing untrue and nasty stuff under the protection of proxy IPs.

Because if something is not done, and done quickly, it could be you next and I don't want anyone to go through what I have gone through.

Thanks for reading and if anyone has any questions I will be happy to respond.

Catherine

nuac

That poster has my sympathies.

There should be legislation controlling anonymous malicious posting.

RYS was completely irresponsible in that regard

CatherineMac

nuac wrote: »

That poster has my sympathies.

There should be legislation controlling anonymous malicious posting.

RYS was completely irresponsible in that regard

Thank you nuac.

John Gill, founder of RYS single handedly ruined their site by the way he ran it and allowed it to be run. Had they done it in a sensible way without resorting to personal attacks and instead run it as a place where people could have gone for guidance if they had a grievance with their solicitor that would have been fair enough. But John Gill only started the site to beat his own drum and his many grievances against various solicitors and state bodies ~ or just anyone who didn't agree with him. There probably were many genuine poster initially but Mr. Gill didn't really want any of that and instead used the site/s to encourage abuse of anyone and everyone as he saw fit.

I hope there will be something done about our lack of laws governing the misuse of the internet and there certainly will be if I have anything to do with it.

Tom Young

Mod note: This thread is being monitored.

CatherineMac

Tom Young wrote: »

Mod note: This thread is being monitored.

Hi Tom

I have no intention of posting anything bad here, I just want to highlight the need for protection of people using the net and my own matter is related to the thread.

Catherine

Tom Young

Catherine: The posting was not directed at your posts.

I am generally asking MODS to keep an eye on this thread. We don't need to give anyone an excuse to come here and troll or claim that we defamed anyone.

Regards,

Tom

CatherineMac

Tom Young wrote: »

Catherine: The posting was not directed at your posts.

I am generally asking MODS to keep an eye on this thread. We don't need to give anyone an excuse to come here and troll or claim that we defamed anyone.

Regards,

Tom

Ah, grand Tom. Thanks.

krd

I don't know John Gill's case. And I'm not a in the legal profession.

But I have seen very iffy things happen in the past. For example. A business man I knew. He had a fire at one of the places he stored his stock (it was expensive stock - that went up in smoke). He was covered by insurance. But whatever way he was covered, he was technically insolvent. All this time the business kept trading, as usual. I never understood the full details of this. He ends up losing his business - and the use of his name. And two solicitors end up owning his business - these are solicitors he'd dealt with before, who knew his business. The insurance is paid - the solicitors now have the business and the cash. And they try to transfer the debts of company onto him. They were trading using his name on what used to be his business - and they came after him when he tried to establish a similar business - he wasn't even allowed use his own name.

If that happened to me. I could see how it might drive someone crazy. What the solicitors did, to acquire his business was completely crooked - though absolutely legal. Or at least, he did not have the resources to fight them.

There's an abuse of the law, that goes on in Ireland (it probably happens everywhere) where those with cash can use the law spuriously against those who don't have cash. You do see it internationally. Large companies taking spurious patent violation cases against their competitors, in an effort to damage their competitors business.

I've seen it done in Ireland on a few occasions. One large Irish company had a tactic of bankrupting, or attempting to bankrupt, new entrants to its market with spurious legal actions. It was no skin of the big companies nose, but a few companies were bankrupt because they didn't have the resources to defend themselves - their legal costs made their businesses completely infeasible. That was the tactic. At no point could the companies being victimised come out and claim that the legal system was being abused. They'd find themselves up in court - up against the entire legal profession - who were riding the gravy train, and not in the mood to see it stopped.

This even went on with small businesses. There was a nightclub owner, (with deep old money pockets) who would take spurious legal challenges against his competitors. Without naming who it was - he took a group of people I knew to court over a graphic on one of their flyers. They folded their business, because they couldn't afford the legal costs. They were afraid to even talk about what happened - as lord Fauntleroy might come after them with his barristers.

rateyoursolicitor may be a crank site, but shutting these things down, or shutting similar down, shuts down the public discourse. If the law is just to used as tool of the rich, then it's a mugs charter. If freedom of speech, only means freedom for the rich to speech, and everyone else to shut up, you may as well be in the Soviet Union.

A few years ago, a small innovative company, I'll call X, went into voluntary liquidation. All the investors lost their money. All the employees lost their jobs. Their customers lost their service. They had spent millions fighting spurious legal cases brought by their larger competitor. The vast majority of their funds had been used to fight these cases. The closure of the company is reported in the newspapers - but not the clear, and completely unambiguous explanation of what had happened. Gangsterism. Swindles.

At the minute, there can't be a completely open discourse on the Irish legal profession. If the Irish times accuses anyone of practices that are legal, but crooked, they'll be sued and loose big time.


People should be able to say how dreadful their solicitors are. Some are really dreadful.

People should be allowed to stop spurious legal actions that are concocted to bankrupt them. Other people should be allowed to call these actions spurious. We should be able to call it as it is. And stop them.

I remember a school magazine, written by school children. Where one of the school children, wrote that the local cinema was rubbish and they only ever had old films (the local cinema used to wait two years after release to show films - as they were cheaper). The cinema owner got out his solicitor, and the school was made hand over 2 grand to settle. That is scandalous. And what didn't happen in the next issue of the school magazine, was an article on how the school had just been mugged by the cinema owner and his solicitor.

gigino

irishh_bob wrote: »

ive written possitive and negative reviews on that site , of the solicitors featured which im familiar with , i have to say , most of the reviews were broadly speaking , representative of my own experience

+1. I have to say most of the reviews were broadly speaking, representative of my own experience too. However, I can understand the legal profession not wanting to be rated like that. Other people who provide services eg teachers, dentists, shopkeepers, garages, plumbers would not like a site rating firms in their profession / trade. There can be abuses.

nuac

krd wrote: »

I don't know John Gill's case. And I'm not a in the legal profession.

But I have seen very iffy things happen in the past. For example. A business man I knew. He had a fire at one of the places he stored his stock (it was expensive stock - that went up in smoke). He was covered by insurance. But whatever way he was covered, he was technically insolvent. All this time the business kept trading, as usual. I never understood the full details of this. He ends up losing his business - and the use of his name. And two solicitors end up owning his business - these are solicitors he'd dealt with before, who knew his business. The insurance is paid - the solicitors now have the business and the cash. And they try to transfer the debts of company onto him. They were trading using his name on what used to be his business - and they came after him when he tried to establish a similar business - he wasn't even allowed use his own name.

If that happened to me. I could see how it might drive someone crazy. What the solicitors did, to acquire his business was completely crooked - though absolutely legal. Or at least, he did not have the resources to fight them.

There's an abuse of the law, that goes on in Ireland (it probably happens everywhere) where those with cash can use the law spuriously against those who don't have cash. You do see it internationally. Large companies taking spurious patent violation cases against their competitors, in an effort to damage their competitors business.

I've seen it done in Ireland on a few occasions. One large Irish company had a tactic of bankrupting, or attempting to bankrupt, new entrants to its market with spurious legal actions. It was no skin of the big companies nose, but a few companies were bankrupt because they didn't have the resources to defend themselves - their legal costs made their businesses completely infeasible. That was the tactic. At no point could the companies being victimised come out and claim that the legal system was being abused. They'd find themselves up in court - up against the entire legal profession - who were riding the gravy train, and not in the mood to see it stopped.

This even went on with small businesses. There was a nightclub owner, (with deep old money pockets) who would take spurious legal challenges against his competitors. Without naming who it was - he took a group of people I knew to court over a graphic on one of their flyers. They folded their business, because they couldn't afford the legal costs. They were afraid to even talk about what happened - as lord Fauntleroy might come after them with his barristers.

rateyoursolicitor may be a crank site, but shutting these things down, or shutting similar down, shuts down the public discourse. If the law is just to used as tool of the rich, then it's a mugs charter. If freedom of speech, only means freedom for the rich to speech, and everyone else to shut up, you may as well be in the Soviet Union.

A few years ago, a small innovative company, I'll call X, went into voluntary liquidation. All the investors lost their money. All the employees lost their jobs. Their customers lost their service. They had spent millions fighting spurious legal cases brought by their larger competitor. The vast majority of their funds had been used to fight these cases. The closure of the company is reported in the newspapers - but not the clear, and completely unambiguous explanation of what had happened. Gangsterism. Swindles.

At the minute, there can't be a completely open discourse on the Irish legal profession. If the Irish times accuses anyone of practices that are legal, but crooked, they'll be sued and loose big time.


People should be able to say how dreadful their solicitors are. Some are really dreadful.

People should be allowed to stop spurious legal actions that are concocted to bankrupt them. Other people should be allowed to call these actions spurious. We should be able to call it as it is. And stop them.

I remember a school magazine, written by school children. Where one of the school children, wrote that the local cinema was rubbish and they only ever had old films (the local cinema used to wait two years after release to show films - as they were cheaper). The cinema owner got out his solicitor, and the school was made hand over 2 grand to settle. That is scandalous. And what didn't happen in the next issue of the school magazine, was an article on how the school had just been mugged by the cinema owner and his solicitor.

KRD

I don't know how two solicitors managed to take over the business of the businessman you refer to. The facts should be referred to the Law Society for investigation,

krd

nuac wrote: »

KRD

I don't know how two solicitors managed to take over the business of the businessman you refer to. The facts should be referred to the Law Society for investigation,

As long as the solicitors haven't broken the law, what good would it be complaining to the law society?

If it's within the law, then it's free enterprise.

The businessman couldn't do anything, because everything the solicitors did was perfectly legal.

The businessman had been trading under his own name - the business owed my father money, yet the solicitors tried to claim these were not debts of the business but were personal debts of the businessman. They were slippery - but they weren't breaking the law.

I don't know how these guys were able to take over the business, but they were and it was perfectly legal.

If I'm in a business, and a wealthier competitor decides to drag me into court on something spurious. If I complained to the law society that my competitor was simply using the law to put me out of business by forcing me to pay for legal expenses I can't afford, what use would it be for me to complain to the Law Society?