A plaintiff’s attorney who frequently files lawsuits against collection agencies has been called out for filing lawsuits in jurisdictions where the plaintiffs do not reside.
“Every single civil cover sheet” filed by Maxim Maximov and his law firm, Maximov Law LLP, “alleges that a respective Plaintiff’s county of residence is Kings County,” New York, claimed Scott Wortman of Warshaw Burstein, who filed a letter with the Chief Magistrate Judge while defending a client in a lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of New York.
After filing the letter, Maximov subsequently dismissed his lawsuit against Wortman’s client, Credit Corp Solutions. A copy of the letter can be read here.
Maximov tried to play off the move as an “inadvertent oversight” and filed a motion to transfer this case to the proper jurisdiction, but Wortman pointed out that this was the fourth such lawsuit that this particular plaintiff had filed and the misstatements had been made on all the other lawsuits as well.
Maximov, whose office is in Brooklyn, which is in Kings County, N.Y., was certifying that his plaintiffs were residents of Kings County and that the incidents related to the lawsuits occurred in Kings County, when in fact they did not. Recently, in an unrelated case, a Texas-based debt buyer was assessed $25 million in civil penalties for filing lawsuits against individuals in the wrong venue and without proper jurisdiction.
Maximov has filed 107 lawsuits against collection agencies this year, according to data compiled by WebRecon.
Wortman went out and found 16 other lawsuits filed on behalf of Maximov in Kings County where the plaintiffs lived elsewhere. In two cases, the plaintiff lived in an entirely different state.
“Plaintiff’s attorney appeared contrite in apologizing for the ‘error,’ expressing to the Court that this type of conduct had never happened before, and will never happen again,” Wortman wrote in his letter. “Nevertheless, there was unquestionably a lack of candor, which is especially troubling given the scope and duration of this conduct.”
The judge in the case, Chief Magistrate Roanne Mann, has forwarded the specific matters addressed in the letter and the case to the Committee on Grievances for the Eastern District of New York.
