On 20 July 2026, Judge R. Gary Klausner of the Central District of California declared Vivek Shah a vexatious litigant in a significant privacy law ruling.
The decision came in the case Vivek Shah v. Crain Communications, Inc., case number 2:26-cv-003070-RGK-CTS, centred on claims under the California Invasion of Privacy Act.
Shah had alleged that Crain Communications, the publisher of Ad Age, secretly captured the contents of his communications through tracking tools on its website.
That claim followed a well-worn template seen in hundreds of similar California lawsuits involving chat tools and analytics software allegedly intercepting website visitors’ communications.
What distinguished this case was what Crain’s lawyers uncovered when they examined Shah’s broader litigation history across courts throughout the United States.
Since late 2021, Shah had filed at least 29 lawsuits against a wide range of companies, including Citibank, PayPal, Bumble, Robinhood, Udemy, American Express, a biopharma company, and a university.
In the seven months before the ruling, Shah filed seven nearly identical CIPA complaints against seven different companies, with almost every case collapsing before a judge could rule on the merits.
The court noted a consistent pattern: Shah would file a complaint, the defendant would move to dismiss, and Shah would voluntarily drop the case before any substantive ruling was made.
Several of Shah’s complaints also appeared to have been copied from unrelated class-action lawsuits filed by entirely different plaintiffs, with the class-action elements simply removed, according to a footnote in the court’s opinion.
To restrict a litigant’s filing rights, courts must apply the four-part test established in De Long v. Hennessey, 912 F. 2d 1144, 1148 (9th Cir. 1990), which Judge Klausner worked through methodically.
Shah received formal notice of the motion and filed an opposition, satisfying the first requirement that litigants receive genuine opportunity to defend themselves before any restriction is imposed.
The judge then built a detailed record, walking through all 29 of Shah’s prior cases one by one, documenting specific cases, dates, and outcomes rather than relying on generalised assertions.
On the question of frivolousness, the court drew on Molski v. Evergreen Dynasty Corp., 500 F.3d 1047, 1058 (9th Cir. 2007), which permits judges to infer bad intent from litigation behaviour without requiring direct proof.
The court found that Shah’s own complaints demonstrated a detailed understanding of the industry practices he was suing over, undercutting any suggestion he was simply an uninformed, injured consumer.
The fact that Shah represented himself without legal counsel was acknowledged by the judge but was not considered sufficient to outweigh the weight of the broader record against him.
Critically, the pre-filing order was carefully scoped: it applies only to new CIPA and related digital-privacy lawsuits Shah might file in the Central District of California going forward.
The existing case against Crain Communications was not dismissed or restricted, and Shah remains free to bring other types of claims or sue in other courts entirely.
Judge Klausner also declined Crain’s request to require Shah to post a security bond covering the company’s legal costs, though he noted future judges handling Shah’s filings could impose that requirement if warranted.
Separately, real estate technology company Lofty Inc. received a CIPA demand letter from Shah in June and chose to go on the offensive rather than negotiate a settlement.
On 8 July 2026, Lofty filed a declaratory judgment action in the Central District of California, asking a judge to rule that its website analytics tools do not violate CIPA and that Shah lacks standing to claim otherwise.
A handful of Shah’s older cases remain pending on appeal before the Ninth Circuit, meaning the broader legal story around his litigation activity may not yet be fully concluded.
The ruling offers a practical blueprint for defendants facing high-volume privacy litigation, demonstrating that compiling a plaintiff’s complete litigation history across multiple courts can hand a judge the full picture needed to act.