A case once crossed my desk that looked completely unremarkable. A trivial amount in dispute. The defendant was a former company employee.
I would have skimmed it in a minute. But one detail caught my eye: the defendant had not filed a single objection. Did not argue at the hearing. Did not appeal, not once. He simply agreed to everything — including language that had no bearing on his own dispute whatsoever. It was, however, perfectly suited to something else.
I checked the case index for a few more disputes filed by the same claimant. Same pattern: a trivial amount, zero resistance from the defendant, and a multi-page reasoned position in the ruling — clearly written not for this dispute, but for the future. It was unsettling. And, at the same time, exhilarating: if a scheme like this existed, you needed to learn to spot it on sight.
I will not name who it was. No fabrication was ever proven there, and I am not entitled to accuse a company based on circumstantial signs. But I have recognized the underlying mechanics at a glance ever since — in different industries, with different claimants. And if I can recognize it, so can you. You just need to know where to look.
How It Works
The scheme is deceptively simple. That is exactly why it works. It is like a prepared opening in chess: as long as your opponent does not know the line has already been worked out in advance, you are playing with a decisive advantage before they even sit down at the board.
Step 1. Pick a defendant with nothing to lose. A former employee. A friendly sole proprietor. The same company under a different name. From the outside, an ordinary dispute between two independent parties. In reality, both sides are dancing to the same tune — the defendant just never got handed any lines.
Step 2. The case is not filed for its own sake. The subject matter is any routine matter: a late delivery, product quality, how to read a contract clause. But what gets built into the ruling is not the amount — it is the wording. How to read the disputed clause. Who bears the risk. What counts as “proper notice.” That exact phrase will later take on a life of its own.
Step 3. Nobody puts up a fight. The defendant does not contest the merits. Does not appeal. Submits the bare minimum of documents. The claimant, meanwhile, often attaches to the case file not just a legal position, but a ready-made draft of the ruling itself — procedural rules expressly allow this: in commercial courts, under Clause 9.2 of the Record-Keeping Instructions for Arbitration Courts (approved by Resolution No. 100 of the Plenum of the Supreme Arbitration Court, 25 December 2013); courts of general jurisdiction have no equivalent formal instruction, but the right to submit any case materials follows from Article 35 of the Code of Civil Procedure. Seeing no real conflict, the judge often adopts the proposed text almost verbatim — not because it is required, but because, under a heavy caseload, it is the fastest way to close the file.
Step 4. The ruling goes into a drawer — sometimes for years. Then it surfaces the moment a real dispute with an actual client comes along. Suddenly the company has “established practice” on hand. Complete with a final court ruling to back it up.
And there it is — the “wow” moment: you are not arguing your own case. You are arguing against a ruling handed down years ago, in someone else’s quiet, unnoticed proceeding. And it gets produced as if it were about you.
An important caveat: if a company simply litigates often and has genuinely, organically built up a body of practice as a result, there is nothing suspicious about that — it is a normal part of working with the courts. This is not about a company having once won real disputes. It is specifically about a quiet, deliberately staged proceeding with not a single genuine attempt at resistance — those are two different things, and they should not be confused.
Why It Works
The economics are simple. Losing a thousand identical claims from real clients is expensive — in money, time, and reputation. Quietly arranging one convenient case is cheap. And that ruling does not substitute for a thousand wins. It shifts the negotiating position in every individual dispute: the lawyer on the other side sees a ready-made ruling and factors it into the risk assessment before the case even reaches court — and often simply agrees to terms they would never have accepted without that trump card.
There is also a second, less obvious reason. The scheme exploits not the courts’ bad faith, but their ordinary workload. Reasoning that has already gone through an instance and survived is a ready-made, very convenient point of reference for a similar case — not because anyone struck a deal, but because, under a heavy caseload, relying on logic already tested by a higher court is objectively more reliable than building the reasoning from scratch every single time.
Where This Shows Up Most Often
The scheme does not work everywhere. Only where disputes are mass-produced and identical — which is exactly what makes one convenient template pay for itself over and over.
Consumer lending and insurance. One standard contract — hundreds of identical disputes over the exact same clause. A hypothetical bank sues its own former employee, who took out a consumer loan with that same bank, over a disputed fee of nine hundred rubles. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary dispute with a rank-and-file borrower. The case is dull, the amount is trivial — and the ruling happens to explain, at length, why automatic insurance renewal on a loan is always and universally lawful. The former employee has no use for that line at all. But when thousands of real borrowers hear the same words from debt collectors a year later, it stops being funny.
Property management companies and utilities. Identical billing, identical resident complaints. A hypothetical management company sues the director’s friend, who bought an apartment in one of its buildings, over a five-hundred-ruble shortfall under a new capital-repair billing formula. From the outside, an ordinary dispute between a resident and the management company. Along the way, the court gets a reason to spell out, in detail, that the formula itself is entirely lawful. The friend has no use for that formula at all — he bought the apartment for the view, not for litigation. And the building next door, genuinely fighting the same management company, inherits a ready-made trump card against its own interests.
Real estate developers. Mass-produced standard equity participation agreements, identical complaints about deadlines and quality. A hypothetical developer sues its own sales manager for violating internal policy — and picks up along the way a finding that a two-month delay in handing over a building “is not material.” The manager, naturally, does not object: the same developer pays his salary. Buyers facing a real delay inherit the finding ready-made.
Telecoms and other mass-contract services. One disputed clause in the standard terms — thousands of identical potential claims at once. A hypothetical carrier sues a former customer support employee over a corporate phone — and secures, along the way, a finding that automatically renewing a paid subscription without the subscriber’s separate consent is lawful. That line then simply gets copied into a thousand replies to complaints.
Marketplaces and warehouse logistics. Hundreds of thousands of items are lost or damaged in warehouses every day, and at that volume, full market-value compensation adds up to enormous sums. A hypothetical marketplace sues a controlled sole proprietor over a warehouse loss worth three thousand rubles — and the ruling happens to establish that, absent documented proof of cost, damages are calculated at the category’s minimum base rate rather than the sale price. The controlled seller does not care — the goods were never real to begin with. And when a genuine seller shows up with a real lost shipment, the platform already has “established practice” on hand, cutting the payout many times over.
The pattern is not industry-specific — it is structural: one standard contract, thousands of identical conflicts. Where every contract is different and every dispute looks nothing like the last, the scheme simply does not pay for itself.
Four Signs I Use to Recognize a Case Like This
No single sign proves anything on its own — cases sometimes look this way without any scheme at all. A defendant’s passivity, for instance, usually has a perfectly innocent explanation: litigating over nine hundred rubles is often more expensive than simply paying, and there may genuinely be no substantive objection to raise — an admission of the claim is explicitly provided for by law (Part 3.1, Article 70 of the Arbitration Procedure Code) and, on its own, points to nothing. But when all four signs line up at once, that is no longer coincidence or reasonable cost-cutting — it is precisely the combination of all four, not any single one, that is the real signal.
You can spot the first three yourself, simply by opening the ruling in a public database such as kad.arbitr.ru. The fourth is not visible to the naked eye — that requires registries and professional tools, and this is exactly the point at which to bring in a lawyer.
- Total passivity: no objections, no appeal, the bare minimum of evidence — in a case where there was something worth fighting for.
- Speed: the case is closed in a single instance, with no hint of a genuine contest.
- Disproportion: a trivial claim amount paired with exhaustive reasoning clearly written with the future in mind.
- A connection between the parties: the defendant is a shell company, a former employee, or a controlled partner, and the matching addresses, founders, and beneficial owners are visible only through the Unified State Register of Legal Entities (EGRUL) and similar databases.
How to Defend Yourself If a Ruling Like This Gets Used Against You
Do not take someone else’s case at its word. If the other side waves a final court ruling around like a ready-made trump card, start with suspicion, not respect. Article 61 of the Code of Civil Procedure and Article 69 of the Arbitration Procedure Code limit the binding effect of established facts to the persons who took part in that specific case — for you, someone else’s ruling is, at most, someone else’s opinion, not a fact to be taken on faith. But res judicata has a second, subtler limit: it shields only the facts themselves from being re-litigated, not the court’s legal characterizations and conclusions. A disputed formulation such as “how to read this contract clause” or “what counts as proper notice” is precisely a legal position, not a fact — and it can and should be argued afresh, even where the facts of that case are formally binding.
There is another reason not to treat someone else’s “practice” as gospel: Russia has no system of binding precedent, and the statute itself sets the priorities. Part 4 of Article 170 of the Arbitration Procedure Code expressly names, as sources for a ruling’s reasoning, decisions of the Plenum and the Presidium of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and official case-law reviews — not a first-instance ruling from someone else’s untested case. If the opponent’s “established practice” is a single quiet ruling from a district or commercial court, rather than a position of a higher court, its real weight is far more modest than the confidence with which it is presented.
This may look like a contradiction: if res judicata does not apply anyway, why would you need the materials from that case at all? Because the persuasive force of the other side’s position does not rest on the wording itself — it rests on the silent assumption that it has already been tested in a real dispute. Show that no testing took place — a planted defendant, a proceeding for show — and that position stops being merely another judge’s opinion and turns into the product of stage-management, something not worth relying on at all. That is exactly why the opponent, by producing that ruling as a trump card, hands you the very reason to take a closer look at how that proceeding actually unfolded — whether there was a genuine dispute or a passive performance staged for a convenient formulation (see Article 10 of the Civil Code below, and the next point for how to check).
Article 10 of the Civil Code is heavy artillery, and you cannot handle it alone. It is important not to conflate two different things. A final ruling in that old case cannot be overturned through your own dispute — it remains in force between those parties, full stop, and that is not up for debate. But the weight the opponent assigns it in your case is a perfectly legitimate subject for debate. Article 10 of the Civil Code exists precisely for a case like this: if the opponent’s conduct in building up this “practice” looks like an abuse of right rather than a good-faith defense of its position, the court is entitled to take that into account when hearing your specific dispute — not by overturning the other ruling, but simply by declining to give it the weight the opponent was counting on. An argument that the underlying contract was a sham transaction (Article 170 of the Civil Code) is also possible, but that is a separate, slow-moving claim, available to far from everyone, and not necessarily applicable to your situation.
Ask the court to obtain the materials of that “model” case. You will not get them on your own — you were not a party to that proceeding. In your own case, you can file a motion to obtain evidence (Article 66 of the Arbitration Procedure Code in commercial courts, Article 57 of the Code of Civil Procedure in courts of general jurisdiction), but the court is equally entitled to deny it if it finds that the other case’s materials are not relevant to the matter being proved in your dispute — that is a common and entirely lawful outcome, not a guarantee of success. The motion works better once you have already shown the connection between the parties and the other signs: a denial becomes harder to justify. And if the materials are obtained after all, the text alone is often enough — an absence of a single objection is visible from the first page.
Show the connection between the parties. EGRUL, registration history, matching addresses, and beneficial owners are all publicly available. A connection alone proves nothing: even the closest people have genuine disputes, not only staged ones. But combined with the defendant’s passivity and the proceeding’s odd speed, it is precisely this connection that turns coincidence into a pattern.
None of this guarantees a win. A court is entitled to decline to examine someone else’s case if it is formally unrelated to your dispute. But these steps turn “they already have a ruling” back into a position that has to be proven from scratch — like any other.
The scheme works for exactly as long as nobody opens that case file and looks not at the court’s conclusion, but at the silence surrounding it.
The flip side of the same logic — when the litigation machinery is used against a business rather than by one for its own defense: Serial Litigants: When a Consent Checkbox Leads to Court.
And when a court itself stops merely tolerating a staged proceeding and starts openly refusing to see the obvious — that calls for a different toolkit, which I have written up separately: The Hippo Effect: How to Fight Judicial Arbitrariness.
That, essentially, is what I do: I read case files so that the silence in them speaks up before it costs you real money.