Georgia's highest court appeared ready to reinstate racketeering claims against a personal injury firm that rival attorneys say illegally harvested car crash victims' data and solicited them as clients, a practice the state's own trial lawyers' association calls pervasive and unchecked.
Justices on the Georgia Supreme Court pressed attorneys from both sides during oral arguments Tuesday in Atlanta, questioning whether competing lawyers who lost prospective clients to the alleged scheme have legal standing to sue. The case, Lazenby v. Cambre & Associates, could reshape how Georgia courts handle disputes over illegal client solicitation, commonly known as "ambulance chasing", and whether the lawyers who lose business to such tactics can fight back under the state's racketeering laws.
R. Shane Lazenby and a group of fellow Georgia attorneys brought the class action against Cambre & Associates, a personal injury firm they accuse of monitoring vehicle crashes, pulling victim data from reports and other sources, and directly contacting injured people to sign them up as clients. Under Georgia law, soliciting an injured person to become a litigant is illegal and violates professional conduct rules for attorneys, Courthouse News Service reported.
The Georgia Court of Appeals dismissed the class action in November 2025. That court found the plaintiff attorneys failed to show they were the "intended victims" of the alleged conduct and that their financial losses were the "direct result" of a predicate act aimed at them. In the appeals court's view, accessing personal data about car accident victims in violation of Georgia computer privacy laws harms only the crash victims whose information was illegally obtained, not the competing lawyers who lost potential clients.
Lazenby and his co-plaintiffs appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, arguing the lower court applied the wrong legal standard. Their position: Georgia law does not require a plaintiff to be the "intended victim" or "direct target" of a predicate act. Proximate cause and foreseeability should be enough.
Chief Justice Nels S. D. Peterson cut to the core of the dispute early in the hearing. He directed his question at the legal standard the appeals court used to toss the case.
Chief Justice Peterson asked:
"General proximate cause just requires it to be reasonably foreseeable, right?"
The question suggested the chief justice saw a gap between the appeals court's "intended victim" requirement and the broader foreseeability test the plaintiffs want applied. If the Supreme Court adopts the proximate cause standard, Lazenby and the other attorneys would face a lower bar to prove their racketeering claims, they would need to show only that their financial harm was a foreseeable consequence of the alleged illegal solicitation, not that Cambre & Associates specifically targeted them.
Justice Charles Bethel pushed even harder on the point. He questioned why the identity of the "intended victim" should matter at all under the statute's plain language.
Justice Bethel stated:
"Why does the intended victim matter when we say, 'any person who is injured by reason of a violation'? If I can make the case that somebody's intent was to create chaos in the economic system, then anyone who has money would be a victim."
Bethel acknowledged that the plaintiff attorneys may face difficulties proving they actually lost specific clients to Cambre & Associates further down the road. But he said that evidentiary question was not for the court to resolve at this early stage of the litigation. The case is still at the pleading phase, whether the complaint states a viable legal claim, not whether the plaintiffs can ultimately prove it at trial.
Courts across the country have increasingly been called on to draw lines around government and institutional authority. In a separate state supreme court case in Missouri, justices intervened on a congressional redistricting dispute, a reminder that state high courts are not shy about stepping into politically and professionally charged territory when they believe lower courts got it wrong.
Kim Jackson, the attorney representing Cambre & Associates, argued that the plaintiff lawyers failed to claim actual damages in a way that could survive scrutiny. Jackson's central point: the plaintiffs should have included the names of specific prospective clients they lost as a result of the firm's alleged conduct. Without those names, Jackson argued, the complaint does not meet the threshold for a racketeering claim.
Matthew Cook, the attorney for Lazenby and the other plaintiffs, fired back with a practical argument. The attorneys do not have that information, Cook contended, precisely because Cambre & Associates reached crash victims before anyone else could. The alleged scheme, in other words, operates in the dark, by the time a competing lawyer learns a victim exists, Cambre & Associates has already signed them up.
Justice Verda Colvin raised a different concern. She questioned whether the attorneys themselves would even qualify as victims of the alleged scheme, as opposed to the car crash victims who were illegally solicited. It is a threshold issue that could determine whether the case proceeds as a class action brought by lawyers or whether any legal remedy belongs to the crash victims alone.
The tension between those two positions, lawyers as victims versus crash victims as the only harmed parties, sits at the heart of the case. And the distinction matters far beyond this one lawsuit. If the Georgia Supreme Court rules that competing attorneys can bring racketeering claims against firms that illegally solicit clients, it would open a new enforcement mechanism in a state where the existing disciplinary system has, by the trial lawyers' association's own account, failed to police the problem.
The Georgia Trial Lawyers Association weighed in with an amicus brief that painted a bleak picture of enforcement. The association told the court that protecting citizens from "predatory, exploitive and manipulative solicitation practices" is a matter of serious concern, and that the practice of soliciting injured persons has "become pervasive and left unchecked."
The association went further, directly criticizing the State Bar of Georgia's handling of complaints. Reported violations, the group stated, "usually go uninvestigated or are given a minimal and cursory review that results in no violation or no discipline."
That is a striking admission from the state's own professional organization of trial lawyers. When the group responsible for representing the interests of personal injury attorneys tells the state's highest court that the disciplinary system has effectively stopped working, it amounts to a concession that self-regulation has failed. The question is whether the courts will step in where the bar association has not.
The broader pattern of institutional enforcement gaps is not unique to Georgia's legal profession. Federal courts have recently struck down longstanding regulatory frameworks when agencies failed to justify their own rules, and executive action has targeted commissions accused of inaction. When the people charged with enforcement stop enforcing, someone else eventually fills the vacuum.
The justices did not signal when they intend to release a decision. But the tenor of the questioning, particularly from Chief Justice Peterson and Justice Bethel, suggested the court is skeptical of the appeals court's narrow "intended victim" standard. If the Supreme Court reverses, the case would return to the trial court level, and Lazenby and his fellow attorneys would get their chance to prove the racketeering claims on the merits.
The case also raises questions that remain unanswered in the existing record. What specific methods does Cambre & Associates allegedly use to monitor crashes and collect victim data? How many attorneys are part of the plaintiff class? Has the State Bar of Georgia taken any formal position on the litigation or the underlying conduct it describes? Those details may emerge as the case progresses, if the Supreme Court gives it the chance to do so.
For now, the facts on the table are damning enough. A personal injury firm stands accused of systematically harvesting crash victims' personal information and contacting them directly, conduct that is illegal under Georgia law. The state bar, by the trial lawyers' association's telling, has done next to nothing about it. And the appeals court told the lawyers who lost business to the alleged scheme that they had no standing to complain.
Accountability in the legal profession, like accountability anywhere else, does not enforce itself. When the regulators stop regulating, the consequences fall on the people playing by the rules, and someone, eventually, has to step in.
If Georgia's highest court revives this case, it will send a message that the courtroom remains open when the bar association's doors are closed. That is not activism. That is the system working the way it is supposed to.
