The fight for fair and predictable civil courts is continuing across the country. Several legislatures have taken the initiative to follow Texas’ lead on passing significant lawsuit abuse reform bills. But a new front in the growing pushback is also emerging: companies are taking their fight back to court and suing individuals, law firms, and criminal networks for their role in pushing inflated medical damages to increase payouts in lawsuits.
In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul is pushing for sweeping reforms to crack down on staged-accident rings and to pass meaningful tort reform policies to address affordability issues in auto insurance. It’s a policy battle in which the Trial Lawyer Lobby is pushing back hard against the claims by pro-reform lawmakers. A new lawsuit filed this month in New York by FedEx, however, is laying out the scams and tactics of one law firm accused of abusing the civil justice system.
Ikhilov Law Group and its owner, Zorik “Erik” Ikhilov, are at the center of a 92-page lawsuit filed by FedEx, claiming Ikhilov “staged accidents, coordinated medical referrals, and rapid escalation to injections or surgeries all to serve a single purpose, which is manufacturing the statutory prerequisites necessary to commence a personal injury action.”
In essence, the law firm coordinated a staged-accident ring, directed clients to medical providers who ran up the medical bills through unnecessary procedures, and used this scheme to file claims against FedEx worth millions of dollars.
Sound familiar? That’s because a jury in a Louisiana Federal Court recently convicted two billboard attorneys and their law firms on charges of executing a decade-long staged accident scheme targeting 18-wheelers in an ongoing saga federal officials have dubbed “Operation Sideswipe.” One witness who testified at trial said, “It was all fraud.”
Trial attorneys have pushed back against the promotion of these cases, arguing that they are crimes for the criminal courts to address. Those objections intentionally ignore the trial lawyer playbook that these law firms have created. Whether the genesis of the case is a staged collision or not, these law firms inflate medical damages by steering clients to collaborative healthcare providers who run-up medical bills. Then, the lawyers file lawsuits based on these manufactured bills in an effort to extract multi-million-dollar settlements. Staging a collision is only part of the ongoing fraud.
It’s not just companies like FedEx that are exposing these schemes. More companies are fighting back and taking on these exploitative practices through the court system. In late 2025, State Farm settled a lawsuit with a medical provider who was similarly filing inflated insurance claims. In the lawsuit, State Farm said it paid more than $6.5 million in connection with legal cases settled or litigated with 335 patients a doctor named Sanjay Misra treated for various neck and/or back pain. That lawsuit was settled with Misra being ordered to pay the company $314,000. Additional details of the settlement were blocked by Misra’s attorneys, who filed a motion to prevent the public from seeing the court transcript from an Oct. 2 settlement hearing. Similarly, Uber has filed numerous RICO cases across the country in the last 12 months, pushing back against law firms that engage in these illegal practices.
These cases illustrate a problem within the civil justice system that continues to have a direct impact on insurance premiums. The ever-increasing cost of insurance is driven, at least in part, by frivolous lawsuits like these. Unfortunately, Texans will have to wait until 2027 to see whether lawmakers in Austin will pass legislation to stop these lawsuits from driving up the cost of everyday goods and services.