When you’re confronted by a complaint alleging civil RICO violations, it’s reasonable to be trepidatious. After all, a plaintiff’s success in a RICO case has the potential to trigger triple damages. Take heart, though, as there are also numerous opportunities for you to defeat that RICO claim before it even gets to trial. Whether it’s continuity, causation, the pattern of racketeering activity, or some other required element of RICO pleading, RICO law has many requirements where the price for failing to plead properly is dismissal. If your business has encountered such a complaint, look to an experienced Atlanta civil RICO lawyer to help you achieve your best possible result.
In this post, we’ll focus on one requirement in particular — causation — and one recent RICO case where that was the crux to the defense’s success.
The parties were a startup company that manufactured pallets and one of the startup’s lenders. After the startup defaulted, the lender sued in both state and federal courts. In the federal lawsuit, the lender alleged that a group that included two of the startup’s shareholders, plus two of the startup’s employees, in addition to another of the startup’s lenders and that company’s principals engaged in a RICO conspiracy.