Three out of ten civil actions in state courts are considered predatory law, according to projection by the Minas Gerais Court of Justice Intelligence Center (CIJMG).
This practice, known in the legal environment as predatory litigation, consists of one of the parts, almost always with fraudulent arguments, to obtain illicit gains and overload the judiciary.
In the understanding of the Courts and the (National Council of Justice), these actions are superficial, procrastinatory or even fictional.
Stores of these type cost R $ 12.7 billion a year to the country’s cuts, according to the TJ-MG analysis released in April 2022, based on a report by IPEA (Institute of Applied Economic Research).
The courts are concerned about this account, as one of the characteristics of predatory law is the request for free justice – who comes in with the lawsuit says he cannot pay for the process.
Expenses of this size indicate the existence of a billionaire market for the model, which, according to CIJMG, prioritizes the area of consumer law.
Retail and banking sectors are among the most affected.
“All companies that take care of many lives are the target of predatory law. Banks and retail mainly but also telephone, insurers, airlines,” says lawyer Daniel Gerber, expert in mass corporate law.
There are no official data, but the executive of a large retailer told UOL that the sector should spend close to $ 5 billion a year with such actions, between civil and labor causes.
These cases are interested in offices that have hundreds of identical actions to ensure any gain with the volume of orders.
An example of abuse that caught the attention of federal courts is a case of 2022 of the TJ-MS (Mato Grosso do Sul Court of Justice).
The Special Court of the STJ (Superior Court of Justice) judges an appeal against the decision of the State Court with the purpose of defining a thesis against predatory litigation.
Between January 2015 and August 2021, the TJ-MS received 64,037 actions on payroll loans. Of this total, 43.6% were sponsored by a single office.
“In all, the initial petition developed hypothetical narrative, reporting that the plaintiff did not remember if the loan has celebrated,” according to the case file in the STJ.
The rapporteur of the lawsuit, Minister Moura Ribeiro, voted in February 2024 to allow the judge, when he realizes evidence of predatory litigation, ask the separate – and not to the lawyer – who submit documents “capable of minimally” the requests made.
The trial is interrupted by a request for a view.
São Paulo leads spending
CIJMG projected the reach of predatory law from the analysis of the actions of the main topics in the courts of states – contractual clauses and consumer law.
Then he extended the numbers to the other matters and consulted other courts, which confirmed the number of 30% as minimum level of the performance of the predatory law.
At the cost of more than R $ 12 billion pointed out by the TJ-MG, the common proceedings and those in the special courts, which judge causes of up to 40 minimum wages, enter.
São Paulo concentrates more than 10% of this value.
The Paulista TJ spent R $ 16.7 billion on predatory actions between 2016 and 2021, according to a study by the Court’s Corregedoria, also based on Ipea’s work. They are $ 2.7 billion per year.
In October 2024, the CNJ ratified this data and issued a recommendation in which he asked for information and documents to the authors of the actions to prove if the process was legitimate.
The Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) was sought by UOL, but did not respond to requests for an interview.
Lawyers
Responsible for almost 30% of processing processes in the country, TJ-SP has monitored since November 2024 individuals who consider “great litigants”.
Between January 2021 and August 2024, the civil courts of the state capital received 73.6 thousand lawsuits. Of these, 38%, or 28,000 shares, were filed by 37 offices. The other 45.6 thousand lawsuits were filed by 16,400 offices.
This is what the court has called “atypical distribution”, considered another characteristic of predatory litigation.
The court told UOL could not inform these offices.
In May 2024, the Bahia court sent the OAB local sectional to suspend the registration of four lawyers who sponsored 32,000 cases in the State Special Consumer Court.
R $ 309 thousand in goods were also blocked. The process is confidential.
It is suspected that this group of lawyers has filed identical actions with false documents.
The procedure was opened at the request of the retailer itself, who presented to the Corregedoria a series of sentences in which they recognized the predatory performance of the lawyers:
- identical indemnity claims;
- same number of overtime worked, but not paid;
- same number of vacation days not taken, but not compensated;
- threatens witnesses;
- aggressive customers capture.
By December 2023, the Labor Court of Rio de Janeiro had already fined days at R $ 1.7 million for “conduct fearily fraudulent” in labor lawsuits against Casas Bahia.
The judge also sent letters to the companies Ri Happy, Magazine Luiza, Renner stores and Sugar Loaf to evaluate if they are also being victims.
He found that the sum of the claims requested in shares against companies totaled R $ 12 million, an average of R $ 447.1 thousand per process.
Requests of this type of action on the rod usually revolve around $ 80,000.
Days after Rio TRT’s decision, the TRT de Minas Corregedoria adopted a similar measure against the same group.
On January 14, he sent letters to all first instance judges asking if they identified evidence of predatory litigation of these lawyers.
In a statement to UOL, Marcos Roberto Dias with the “sole and exclusive purpose of labeling and staining the office image (before customers and the judiciary) and trying not to lose the processes”.
Dias says that the decisions used in requests to open investigations against his office have already been renovated in the second instance and that another Court, the TRT of Rio Grande do Sul, also denied that his office practiced predatory law.
Within the company
One of the lawsuits against Casas Bahia, to which UOL had access, shows that the offices have even help from the company’s employees.
According to one witness, a professional dismissed for just cause was challenged by another employee on the department of Human Resources.
The dismissed professional received a visiting card from Solon Tepedino. The orientation was to look for the bank and say the name of those who indicated it, that everything would be sent.
The report sought the office, but had no return.
But in most labor cases, it is the office who seeks former employees to sign ready-made petitions.
Businessman Paulo Malveladi, owner of a technology company that provides services to Casas Bahia, adds the report: the person is sought by the office, but informs that he does not have enough documents to file a labor action.
The office then reports that it already has all the documents and the worker only needs to sign the power of attorney.
“These are spreadsheets with tables of hours worked, with all overtime computed. But they are false tables. The office only exchanges the name of the worker and enters the action,” says Malvezzi.
In September 2023, Malvezzi hired lawyer Guilherme Fleury to try to solve the problem. Since then, Fleury says he has worked in a hundred processes. According to him, 99 were equal.
In addition to falsifying documents and power of attorney, Fleury found a triangulation in these cases. In one process, one person is part and the other, witness. In the other, there is reversal of papers.
Mass Advocacy Against Predatory Advocacy
Lawyer Daniel Gerber’s office specializes in corporate mass law. Defends companies that respond to thousands of processes on the same issues daily.
“The defenses are similar because the requests are almost equal. But the petitions of the complaining are not the same,” explains Gerber.
Today, according to him, this means advocating against predatory litigation. Responsible for more than 90,000 lawsuits, Gerber finds the estimate of 30% of the study released by the TJ-MG low.
He says he sent a letter to the OAB Federal Council in early 2025 to complain about “suspicious attitudes” of lawyers who sponsor actions against their clients. Gerber says he never had an answer.
According to the legal director of Febraban (Brazilian Federation of Banks), Vicente de Chiara, eight financial institutions told the entity that they respond to 300,000 actions considered abusive.
In another consultation, this time to four banks, Chiara found that these institutions spent $ 500 million per year on predatory actions.
One of the common performances against banks, according to Gerber, is to use bank correspondents. The correspondents take the data from those who buy a bank product and use the information to file mass actions against banks and insurers without the person knowing.
This was the case of a criminal organization convicted in 2023 in São Paulo for fraud, corruption and coercion.
According to the complaint, the organization falsified documents such as sentences, police acts and bank orders to raise values on behalf of third parties who did not know that they were used by a scheme.
According to the Public Prosecution Service of SP, there were 500 victims injured in three thousand fake cases. Two hundred people were arrested.
