I'm now involved (on the right side), personally and professionally, in an ongoing substantial real-life criminal mega-case of both lawyer crime and  (mostly by lawyers) inheritance crime, with some defamation nonsense criminally thrown in. All six books in the present series arise most immediately from that one case.

I have other reasons for writing these six books:-

• It's worth telling the story of how villainous lawyers hose their own customers, and how ditto inheritance professionals — usually lawyers, often operating in gangs (eg the estate manager criminal is a lawyer and hires co-criminals in his own firm and outside, etc.) — hose heirs. It's right to expound the criminal side of that fiduciary disaster not only technically for good-guy lawyers but also accessibly for the lay reader. One can easily do both at the same time

• When I think of regular folks — political activists, human rights activists, environment activists, wrongly convicted prisoners etc. — sweating it out in public libraries, prison libraries, etc. just to learn a bit of law, it's right to write a technical law book with the lay reader and his hard-fought causes very much in mind, especially if let down by his own lawyer

• the three subjects of the present series — lawyer crime, inheritance crime and defamation — are of a piece: the lay victim customer or victim heir who makes a fuss and does not run along quickly and quietly is likely to find himself at the end of a defamation claim, a defamation litigation threat and maybe even an actual defamation lawsuit, all criminal. 

LAWYER CRIMINALS: In almost thirty years of law practice I saw, and in around fifty years and counting as a consumer of legal services I've seen, an awful lot of misbehavior, in various jurisdictions, from lots of lawyers, especially specialists especially in their own fields. In my experience, the law profession is thoroughly dysfunctional inherently and exherently; the profession is protected by (among other things) indifferent incompetent (and thus complicit) regulators; secrecy about consumer complaints and disciplinary proceedings; and the public absence of relevant statistics (including by geography and field of practice) and other data. I perceive a sociopathic and psychotic component in the behavior of many lawyers I've encountered. For those failing to practise it calmly, sensibly, rationally, intelligently, competently, diligently, loyally and honestly, and their trusting abused victims, the law is a toxic profession. And the abuse is not just one incident quickly forgotten. We're talking serial and parallel multi-dimensional multiple comprehensive continuous hosing.

THEIR VICTIMS: Dysfunctional too is the stereotypical lay and corporate customer. He is awestruck by the most assinine lawyer. He has no clue about how to hire, instruct, supervise, scrutinise, control, evaluate, pay, fire, evaluate, challenge, corner, expose or properly pursue lawyers. Because he lacks the knowledge, experience, intelligence, vocabulary, technique and integrity to know or care what is sound and not sound law practice, and because he is obviously an easily manipulated supine simpleton, lawyers get away with the most outrageous behavior and think that they are entitled to. The uninformed, mis-informed, benumbed, inarticulate victim customer is easily pillaged, neglected, undermined, cheated, defrauded, abused, intimidated and silenced by lawyer criminals.

DYSFUNCTIONAL ENVIRONMENT: Like inheritance crime, there's no culture, including among regulators, legislators, law enforcement, victims or eufuctional lawyers, of treating lawyer crime as criminal; the professional subject of lawyer crime is very underdone everywhere including America (I gather that lawyer malpractice lawyers there do not always or often deal with lawyer crime); lawyer criminals have their protectors, including incompetent regulators and "It's a civil matter" police (not esteemed or even known for their pre-eminence in civil law, and having not read the file or applied elementary criminal law to the facts). Lawyer crime is all too often the perfect crime.

I detect that of late the situation on both sides has become worse. This is the ideal environment and the right time for this project's three innovative books on lawyer crime.

INHERITANCE CRIMINALS: I've seen quite enough of this, personally and professionally, in various jurisdictions, from heirs, executors, administrators, lawyers on all sides including the victim's, a policeman, police complaints adjudicators, a judge, regulators, auction houses, etc. My inheritance crime consulting website has some details. This is the ideal environment and the right time for this project's three innovative books on inheritance crime.

DEFECTIVE DEFICIENT CULTURE: Like lawyer crime, there's no culture of treating inheritance crime as criminal; the professional subject of inheritance crime is not well developed — the most one usually sees, mostly from American lawyers, are 'inheritance theft' and the jejune 'inheritance hijacking' — and in some jurisdictions does not exist; inheritance criminals have their protectors, including corrupt judges, incompetent regulators and "It's a civil matter" police. Victims of inheritance crime are uninformed, mis-informed, benumbed, intimidated and inarticulate. Inheritance crime is all too often the perfect crime. 

It won't do!

So lawyer crime and inheritance crime are on my radar, and I hope on yours. To round things off, in case there should be any doubt about one's legal, moral, human and other rights and obligations to examine, elucidate, expose and properly pursue these criminals, this project has a book on defamation law and practice, defamation litigation and free speech.

The object of these six books as a set, for both the lay and professional reader, is to expose and then destroy the mystique of each subject for both sides. I'll accomplish that with beautifully clear crisp multi-sided explanations using plain everyday language, graphics, tables, illustrations and real-life case studies.

We start with a clear exposition and a genuine understanding of relevant law and practice, both theoretical and practical, and both generically and in selected jurisdictions. 

You can tell from the book's webpage that we're really going to town on it and have some fresh expository and elucidatory ideas. The geology, botany, combinatorics, fractals, AI, models, simulations etc. are useful when examining, expounding, exposing, properly pursuing, indicting and prosecuting lawyer criminals and inheritance criminals, which is what this whole exercise is all about. 

It's fun, easy and necessary to pellucidate what the general run of practitioner texts and practising lawyers obfuscate, if they discuss it at all.

I maintain a considerable archive and have a good, unforgiving memory. The book is full of examples of flagrant criminal misconduct, by practising lawyers at every stage in the customer-lawyer relationship: from the lying at the outset, to hooking and playing the customer like a fish, through the horribly messed up lawyering and personal dysfunction, to florid overbilling and corrupt internal complaints handling and holding the file to ransom and lying, faking, cheating and concealing throughout. 

My perspective is that these rackets are criminal. As with inheritance crime and criminals, there seems to be some conceptual and cultural difficulty characterising lawyer crime as criminal. We'll see about that.

This book is a particularised eye-opener about lawyer criminals, what they do, how they do it, and how they get away with it, using real cases from my archive, vividly presented and explained. Incredibly, there are, to my knowledge, no other books on the same comprehensive scale. Why aren't other lawyers regularly blowing the whistle on those secret billing targets?

This is not a book about civil malpractice. That subject is already quite well covered and malpractice litigation is commonplace, at least in America. (In some jurisdictions it's almost unknown.) 

Appraised of lawyer rackets, let the prospective and actual customer now set out to sensibly interact with a decent lawyer and preempt getting hosed. This is the book to read the night before you go shopping for legal service providers. Again, decades of personal and professional experience are behind it. 

The prospective customer must be able to think clearly at all times when searching for a genuinely appropriate lawyer. The actual customer must then be able to look after himself throughout, and know what to do when hosed. All stages of the relationship can be eucalibrated, stabilised and regularised from the outset with a primer intended for both sides. Here it is. But it can really only claim to supplement the sensible customer's instinctive aversion to charlatans, posers, shysters and other stamps of lawyer villain. The customer lacking such inner direction will probably find this book tiresome and incomprehensible.

Cavilling about 'customer'? Consider the Latin etymology of 'client'. In days of Roman yore, the cliens was a parasitic dependant of his patronus who, preening himself in his toga, must have savored patronising this subservient nuisance. You don't need a knowledge of ancient history: the gist is in the New English Dictionary, vol. II (Clarendon Press, 1893), pp.497-8. Apparently 'client', of all possible words, has been used in the customer-lawyer context since 1413. There was no rational justification in principle for it then and there has never been any since: the lawyer's customer properly regarded is the opposite of the Roman cliens. Irritating to anyone sensitive to its patent connotations, 'client' in relation to a mere service provider has over the centuries in the common unconscious undermined the customer's status, sabotaged his standing, elevated the lawyer, and come to describe a deplorable situation quite accurately. 'Customer' is the correct term to recalibrate the relationship.

Like the series' other books, this book is the product of a substantial continuing real live case I've been involved in for some time. Again it reflects my experiences and contains rich material direct from my extensive archive. 

You'll gather from my inheritance crime consulting website — which gives you a detailed preview of some relevant subjects — that inheritance crime is universal and that police and prosecutors don't treat inheritance crime as crime, and need educating. The sagacious pontificatory pretentious presumptuous "It's a civil matter" is really annoying, even were the policeman to have the civil law expertise and intimate knowledge of the file, and even if the victim heir had (inexplicably) asked him to evaluate the entire file and render his detailed professional opinion on civil law (and in that case "It's a civil matter" is intriguing but hardly sufficient). Victimised heirs ("Run along now, you've had some of your inheritance") are not much better: their story is largely about complacency, ignorance, laziness, indifference, cowardice, irresponsibility, self-neglect and inarticulateness. Not good!

A fascinating subject, definitely not as dry as it sounds. Stirring and digestible, actually. The foundation, culmination and consummation of inheritance crime are often false, fabricated interim and final financial statements, financial filings (including tax) and a criminal saga of underlying primary and secondary source material. ("We've even criminally thrown in a multiply criminal balance sheet. What more do you want?") As with the other books, I have personal and professional reasons for getting things straight.

All inheritance accounts prepared by any internal or external bookkeeper or accountant, especially a naïve simpleton, should be rebuttably presumed to be deliberately and or recklessly materially false and misleading concerning all figures and the features, characteristics, merits, cost, price, value and worth of all relevant underlying issues, situations, relationships and transactions. 

There's a whole specialty and culture concerned with bookkeepers and accountants generating, producing, promulgating and legitimising unqualified false estate and estate management financial statements, false tax and other filings, and other infecilities, on the instructions of the inheritance criminal and exclusively from data supplied by her. The naïve or complicit accountant advertently or inadvertently sanitises, launders and converts those data into a criminal contrivance of huge criminal value to the inheritance criminal.

The estate manager and the accountant jointly and severally create these multi-purpose financial statements to give a particular specific detailed impression to the victim heir, the tax authorities, judges, lawyers etc. of the financial and general state of the estate, the state of the inheritance of each heir, the nature, quality and merits of estate management, and the probity of the estate manager and his relevant associates. The inheritance criminal wants the financial statements to give a false impression. The naïve accountant, who might never see the file or even one supporting voucher (and even then could not possibly for a view of its legitimacy, merits, etc.) and has no idea what's going on, delusionally thinks that they are giving a true impression. 

Interim and final estate financial statements amount to the accountant endorsing, legitimising and sanitising the situation in favor of the estate manager and her estate management: a clean bill of health plus a reference. The result: the perfection and culmination of already perfect inheritance crime (for more, check out my inheritance crime consulting website).

All that the numerate vigilant functional materially uninformed, materially misinformed victim heir can discern on its face (and without any supporting primary source material) from a patently (and usually cunningly constructed, all too plausible) nonsensical incomprehensible incoherent financial statement is that it's worse than useless and flagrantly criminal, including, presumptively, by the people who commissioned and the people who created it: not only one interim financial statement but each succeeding interim financial statement and the final financial statement, in relation to every figure on every horizontal and vertical line, everywhere in the chain. Especially if prepared by the accountant and tendered to the victim heir without underlying primary source material or any other data enabling verification, these financial statements are patently worse than worthless, except, principally, as evidence. 

And don't bother hiring a forensic accountant. No forensic fiduciary accountant will ever deliver financial statements tat correlate enumerate underlying criminality that goes beyond mere theft. That would require getting to the bottom of the criminal relationships and transactions underlying the phony financials and professionally doing some legal, transactional and financial distinguishing, segregating and labelling. All outside the scope.

And don't bother hiring a forensic fiduciary auditor. The professional forensic fiduciary auditor of inner-office, back-office, front-office, recourse and other criminal estate management financials will never detect in any them the slightest legal irregularity. He might with an electron miscroscope go through the entire financial archive and each inheritance criminal's entire file, and everyone else's files including those of the victim heir and his lawyers, and in a case beyond mere obviously missing money never detect the plain-view herd of elephants in the room.

And of course there's no profession of forensic fiduciary inheritance financial analyst who has the entire file and speaks with authority to the merits of each financial transaction. That would require specialist law training, expertise and experience; unrestricted access to everyone's files; access to people who genuinely know the estate better than the estate manager; perfect knowledge of all relevant inheritance-related facts and dynamics… Forget it. Even if any finance professional in the system knew the whole truth, he is not legally qualified and has no competence to judge or opine whether any underlying relationship or transaction is lawful or not. 

So many professionals all over the place (in addition to all the lawyers, in the management of a substantial estate). Such little realism, insight, shrewdness, sagacity, skepticism and competence. So much deliberate or reckless assistance to inheritance criminals knowing that one has never scratched the surface (and even then would not have known what to do) and could have missed, and now be superficially but very materially legitimising, everything. 

Why would an entire body of professionals in the most sensitive area of inheritance crime give such a clear impression of collusion and complicity, or at the very least indifference, stupidity and recklessnesss? Isn't it obvious that inheritance is a fertile ground for criminality and that estate accounts are how it's accomplished?

These and other concerns are expressed and discussed in this ground-breaking, no-nonsense book. A rather loud wake-up call.

BTW, did I say 'estate manager' and confuse you? 'Estate manager' is my convenience term for executor, ad col grantee, interim administrator, full administrator etc. — a ridiculous abundance of terms (to say nothing of the Latin gender variants, used absurdly). We have needed one generic term. Now we have it.

What's a book about defamation litigation doing in this project? This book is the project's conceptual and practical culmination. It's the main event up to which the other books have been working. In a nutshell, lawyer criminals and inheritance criminals when called out generally or in detail by their effectually vociferous victim customer have two standard harrassment and intimidation techniques: multiply dishonestly claiming that his criticisms, claims and complaints are defamatory (even though not uttered to a third person), and dishonestly threatening to dishonestly sue him for defamation. These are not general challenges to free speech. They are specific challenges to free speech criminally invoking defamation law.

Here again are those personal and professional underlying reasons, and my archive. I have live, somewhat fresh specimens of lawyer criminals pulling this racket on me and a friend of mine. It helpfully adds to the criminal cases and is fun to properly deal with, but is likely to cause problems for the uninformed layman.

Here's the game in more detail. The victim customer has been hosed by his own lawyer, and the victim heir has been hosed by his fellow heirs, the corrupt executor, the corrupt administrator, their lawyers, his own lawyers, judges, police, regulators, etc. — just about everyone who could possibly have had a hand in it. 

These victims are still neurologically functional and want to publicly expose and properly pursue the perpetrators individually, in combination and collectively. Each has given the game away in a standard robust written complaint to the professional criminal, who will retort — even better, the senior partner will retort — with the outrageous lie that the communication is defamatory (it can't be if addressed only to the perpetrator and no-one else, and it can't be if it's all true, or opinion) plus that defamation litigation threat. 

No real surprises there, but it's stunning and deplorable to see this all-too-predictable set piece, on both sides, acted out in real life. The villain professionals think they are entitled to do anything they want and get away with it, especially all the way to the bank. They like giving the stunned victim the impression that they are untouchable. 

The threats are probably quite effective some of the time. Those despicable claims of defamation and those threats of defamation litigation do subdue even aware — but ultimately cowardly — victims. It's a cascade of misfortunes for the victim and slam dunks for the perpetrators. What lay victim, already debilitated and dispirited — and maybe he has already had enough — knows enough about defamation litigation to fight back? The victim might be scared and numbed into ever looking at his own file again, let alone investigating, examining, evaluating, valuing, expounding, exposing and properly pursuing criminality and other wrongdoing. Terminally disoriented and demoralised, he might even fear to talk about the situation to a good-guy malpractice, fraud, crime or defamation lawyer, if he can find one. He'll need resilience, fortitude, stamina and a strong stomach.

And of course, as with lawyer criminality and inheritance criminality generally, he'll get the "It's a civil matter" brush-off and cop-out from the police, every one an eminent and claivoyant (and laconic) civil lawyer.

Online searching reveals no organisation, community, discussion group, forum or source of information, advice, help etc. specifically in relation to free speech, or anything else, for victims of lawyer crime or inheritance crime. There might be one lurking out there but I haven't found it yet. Try searching 'victims of lawyer crime' and 'victims of inheritance crime'. This is part of the problem: victims of professional criminals and criminal professionals are not organised and are left to speak for themselves if they dare.

So the whole culture needs exposing and eradicating on both sides, and this book, which nicely covers the psychological dynamics and the principles and realities of defamation law, practice and litigation, is going to help to do that. 

Some of what is making writing it so stimulating and enjoyable:-

• thinking through those bogus assertions of defamation and those criminal threats of criminally litigating the 'defamation', and the effects they have on the victim

• educating the milquetoast victim — uninformed, spineless — that the assertions and threats are just a predictable criminal extension of the underlying criminality

• eradicating the villains' auras of immunity, impunity and invincibility and eludicating exactly how they can be exposed and properly pursued

• encouraging the victim to properly, rationally, sensibly go after the criminals, defamation litigation threats be damned (including against this project's publisher and author)

• educating the victim about defamation litigation if it should come to it: how to sue and how to defend and counter-attack. You do not need a lawyer to tell you these things.

The book has evolved from its original narrow compass as outlined above to a broader exposition on freedom of speech for a wider readership: activists, journalists, human rights lawyers, etc.: anyone who speaks his mind or wants to speak it; is met with flagrantly dishonest claims of defamation and threats of criminally instituted, criminally conducted defamation litigation, and is still composed enough to ask himself, "Now what?" 

So now the whole six-books project is, in its essence, about human rights.