In Westwood Park, a neighborhood of old pine trees and stucco houses, families are serious about preserving the quality of life. A community task force once helped police shut down a crack-cocaine dealer who was setting up shop here.
Lately, residents have set their sights on what some consider another nuisance: Patricia A. McColm.Over the years, McColm, a onetime actress with a law degree, has filed nearly 50 lawsuits against her neighbors, tenants, department stores - and others - for all manner of injury.
A San Francisco Superior Court judge observed in court three years ago that McColm was "the most vexatious litigant" she had ever seen - and soon thereafter herself became a defendant in one of McColm's libel suits. Other targets allege that McColm has adroitly used her knowledge of the legal process to win monetary settlements of dubious claims.
Now, McColm is facing a kind of judgment day of her own. A San Francisco Superior Court judge is being asked to make it official and declare her a "vexatious litigant" under California law. A decision is expected any day. If the judge grants the request, McColm could be barred from filing any more lawsuits without court approval or without posting a bond.
Leading the charge is her neighborhood association. More than 100 neighbors have signed a petition supporting the vexatious-litigant proceeding.
"I don't think the system understands what they've unleashed on us," says Anita Theoharis, president of the Westwood Park Association, which has a videotape of two tenants of McColm's moving out last spring under police protection. People still talk about the time McColm had her next-door neighbor tied up in court for eight years over a backyard basketball hoop and eventually was paid $5,000 by an insurance company for her annoyance.
Such is her influence that a local real-estate broker has house hunters initial newspaper articles about McColm before its agents will show homes near hers. "In my professional opinion . . . Ms. McColm's
unconditional ability to file lawsuits renders, at worst, homes in her immediate vicinity unmarketable and at best devalues those properties," reads a declaration filed in court by Joseph Koman, a Coldwell Banker agent and neighbor.
The neighbors are distressed that the judicial system has so far refused to restrain McColm. Earlier this year, a California appeals court declined a bid by Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. to declare her a vexatious litigant as part of a malpractice case McColm had brought unsuccessfully against the health-maintenance organization.
Four years ago a San Francisco Superior Court judge did try to banish her but reversed himself because, he said in an interview, he didn't want to hassle with her inevitable appeals. (She filed suit against him, too, for his com-ments.)
"People are very critical of the legal system," says Theoharis's husband, Stephen, a lawyer for Visa International and a volunteer attorney for the homeowners group. "It doesn't really need reforming. It just needs an intelligent application of the system that is in place. . . . I want to see if some judge has the nerve to apply the damn thing."
To be declared a vexatious litigant is a drastic measure in a nation that officially believes in its courts and the right to sue. But that is happening more frequently. In California, about 200 people have been so declared since the state toughened its law in 1990.
"It is always a fine line between misuse and someone who has an un-fortunate string of events," says Alan Carlson, the clerk of the San Francisco Superior Court, who is among those who, for fear of being sued, don't want to be quoted saying anything specifically about McColm.
In court documents, McColm defends her record. "Merely alleging McColm has a nauseous personality offensive to everyone she chooses to identify as a wrongdoer is legally insufficient . . . irrespective of the number of persons who vote against her in a popularity contest campaign for a one-sided vote," she writes. "Police officers are not viewed by those who commit crimes as their best friends, and even Christ was crucified, and he turned out to be right, didn't he?"
She has reason to feel besieged. Fireman's Fund Insurance Co., a unit of Germany's Allianz AG, is trying to foreclose on her house to recover $72,000 in court costs that it was awarded after successfully defending one of its insureds against McColm in 1992. BankAmerica Corp. - which McColm sued unsuccessfully over an ankle injury in 1989 - has closed her bank account. Both companies have filed court documents in support of declaring her a vexatious litigant.
Others backing the effort include the Residential Builders Association, a trade group that alleges in a filing that McColm has used the threat of litigation to "cheat tradespersons" and stall legitimate construction in her neighborhood. One of the city's largest law firms, Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, has weighed in against McColm, having taken up the pro bono defense of an immigrant housepainter she sued for negligence, breach of contract and fraud.
McColm, 49, attributes her current difficulty to The Wall Street Journal, which two years ago published a front-page story about her litigiousness. She subsequently filed a libel suit against Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of the Journal, but she hasn't served the complaint. She has now been asked by the San Francisco Superior Court to show cause why the suit shouldn't be dismissed for failure to prosecute.
In a recent phone interview that McColm said she was tape-recording, she said, "Considering that your defamatory story created this situation, I certainly think you have something to answer for in court."
Her father, George McColm, says she has received death threats since the Journal article appeared. He says her lawsuits have been widely misconstrued and she is the subject of a bad-faith campaign by insurance companies that refuse to pay her medical bills. "Everybody in town, they all ganged up on her," he says, adding that he has had to cover many of her costs.
But her own legal problems don't seem to have slowed her down. Recently, McColm filed what is at least her third personal-injury claim involving a major San Francisco department store, and another involving an auto accident. (She has been in at least nine auto accidents.) She has sued her carpet cleaner for assault. The rug man was jailed after McColm swore out a warrant for his arrest, though the DA subsequently dropped the charges. Another defendant of late: a deputy city attorney whom she sued for allegedly threatening her "with great bodily injury by cutting," according to her petition for injunctive relief.
The two college students who rented rooms in her house and left under police protection in May were in a dispute with McColm over the young women's alleged failure to leave a gate open for garbage collectors. McColm presented them with a bill for $5,000, citing various infractions of a 13-page lease.
Allen Greenbaum, a retired railroad-company clerk who was embroiled in litigation with McColm over his sons' backyard basketball games, thinks she is due for a change of scenery. "People who are inclined in this way, they should find a place to be way in the country, away from civilization, where they have no worries at all about anybody interfering with their lives," he says in an interview.
In court papers, he writes: "I wholeheartedly support the motion to have McColm declared a vexatious litigant. . . . I will rest easier knowing that the court will exercise this authority and the quality of life in my neighborhood would improve."