A Cycling Icon Took on a Prolific Lawyer. The Dude Got Personal

When Floyd Landis learned his cannabis company was being sued for patent infringement, he thought it was a prank.

He hadn't realized the cannabis-related invention was patent eligible. The lawyer who filed the suit had brought hundreds of similar complaints in recent years, prompting some targets to call his clients "trolls" in legal filings and online posts. And years of legal entanglements had left Landis jaded about lawsuits generally.

Landis, 50, had reached the pinnacle of his sport when, 20 years ago today, he became the third American to win the Tour de France, following seven straight victories by his former US Postal Service teammate Lance Armstrong. But he was stripped of his title after testing positive for a prohibited substance and banished from the sport for two years.

He passionately denied using performance-enhancing drugs for years, raising money for a defense fund and writing a book titled "Positively False." Ultimately, though, he admitted to blood doping and separately, as part of a plea deal, to fraudulently raising millions to defend himself during the anti-doping investigation.

Landis then filed a whistleblower lawsuit against his old team and Armstrong that rocked the sport. Though successful in some sense, the suit would test his endurance, dragging on for eight years.

Floyd’s of Leadville, the business he’d started a decade ago to help cyclists with aches and pains like his, was a comeback of sorts. But there, too, legal fights followed.

There was a series of lawsuits brought by a retail distributor. Investors sought to seize the company’s assets as part of what Landis has described as a hostile takeover. There’s a still-ongoing dispute with the New York broker that recruited those investors. And then this.

"I honestly did think it was a joke or was something that wouldn’t turn into anything at all," Landis said.

But then his lawyer forwarded him an introductory email from Chicago-based lawyer Isaac Rabicoff, representing plaintiff Metronome LLC, asking if the company would settle for $95,000.

Faced with the choice of paying hundreds of thousands to defend a patent suit or cutting a check for far less, a number of defense lawyers and academics in the patent space say, defendants frequently take the deal. The business model of high-volume patent-assertion attorneys like Rabicoff counts on it, they say.

Landis decided to show Rabicoff that this time, he’d messed with the wrong guy. There would be little of the normal formalities and niceties observed in federal courts. "In my mind I said, 'you just picked a fight; let’s fight then.'"

The Dude Doesn’t Abide

"The Big Lebowski" is more than Floyd Landis' favorite movie.

It’s a lens through which he views his life after a dark period following his Tour win—when he was angrily navigating the anti-doping investigation and the accompanying public spotlight, and fighting an addiction to painkillers prescribed after a hip operation.

Like the Coen Brothers film’s protagonist, Jeffrey Lebowski, who goes by "The Dude," Landis says he tries to take life's absurdities in stride. In the film, the Dude, played by a robe-wearing, weed-loving Jeff Bridges, is mistaken for a Los Angeles millionaire also named Jeffrey Lebowski. The wealthy Lebowski is also the target of a mysterious group seeking ransom money in exchange for the return of his kidnapped wife.

Landis saw "parallels" when Metronome sued him for $95,000, he would later tell a federal judge in an affidavit filled with references to the movie.

"FoL has no money because countless lawyers have unsuccessfully sued FoL in the past five years; and an individual who I have never met and calls his law firm Rabi Law is demanding more in settlement than could ever be recovered in litigation," he wrote, referring to the URL for Rabicoff's firm.

Landis says he’s mellowed out since his cycling career, but, as with the Dude, the calm facade doesn't mean he’s a pushover.

He emailed Rabicoff directly, calling him a "piece of human shit" and a "patent troll douche bag," adding that the plaintiff-side attorney must've adopted a "Jew lawyer" name to "seem like a 'legitimate' lawyer."

"I do regret that," Landis said of the anti-Semitic reference during an hours-long interview at his home in a suburb of New York City.

He says it was an attempt "that came out all wonky" to use an elaborate metaphor based on a "Big Lebowski" subplot in which a character with anger issues converts to Judaism for marriage and then—as a divorcé—performatively brings up his adopted religion.

"Some of the most influential people in my whole life are Jewish, and that’s not who I am or how I think about the world at all," Landis said.

The rest of the vitriol he’d directed at the lawyer, he said, was fair. And there’d be more.

Prolific Patent Lawyer

Rabicoff wasn’t always a patent lawyer. He passed the Illinois bar in 2013 and some of his earliest cases involved insurance defense.

By 2015 he’d passed the patent bar and hung out his own shingle. He and another firm teamed up to represent the owner of an underwater communications patent in infringement suits against five manufacturers of scuba gear.

He filed 955 patent infringement suits alone in 2025, and more than 3,500 over an 11-year span, according to data compiled by patent litigation research firm Docket Navigator. That easily outpaces all other patent litigators since 2000, when the Docket Navigator’s database starts, and puts Rabicoff, a solo practitioner, statistically ahead of many of the country’s largest intellectual property practices.

Of those cases, Rabicoff has taken zero to a jury trial.

Rabicoff’s clients are typically what people in the industry refer to as non-practicing entities, or NPEs. They assert patents and negotiate patent licenses but don’t make or sell products based on the inventions. More than half of the 3,000-plus patent suits filed in the US annually are brought by NPEs, academics and practitioners say.

Big Tech and the patent defense bar pejoratively label many of these NPEs "trolls" because they leverage the high cost of defending a patent suit to extract toll-like payments.

Joe Matal, former acting director of the US Patent and Trademark Office, called Rabicoff "a nuisance settlement guy" but contended the legal system tolerates high-volume patent assertion by making it difficult for defendants to obtain attorneys' fees.

"It’s a viable line of business and nobody does anything about it," Matal said.

The defendants he sues rarely fight. Bloomberg Law reviewed more than 130 suits filed by Rabicoff where the eight plaintiff companies, including Metronome, received funding from Texas-based litigation finance company Marbit Lending LLC. Defendants filed court responses attacking the merits of the case just 15% of the time. They didn’t hire lawyers to enter appearances in a majority of the cases. The suits ended after 161 days on average. By comparison, accounting firm PwC has estimated that the average patent case that goes to trial takes 2.4 years.

Rabicoff declined via email to talk about his cases, saying "I’m generally constrained from discussing any client matters."

Neither Jeffrey Gross, who owns Metronome and at least six of the other seven plaintiff companies, or Jeff Toler, the principal at Marbit, responded to interview requests. (Bloomberg LP was among the companies sued by one of the Marbit-funded entities, InvesTrex LLC. Bloomberg Law is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP.)

Details of settlement negotiations and agreements are typically kept confidential in patent lawsuits. However, in at least six cases filed by Rabicoff clients between 2021 and 2026, exhibits and out-of-court statements show that Rabicoff kicked off negotiations with the same $95,000 offer. The targets ranged from Fortune 500 company Honeywell International to a startup that sells time-tracking software to businesses.

Honeywell told a court in North Carolina that Rabicoff’s client, Patent Armory, "knows that litigating the Texas Lawsuit as well as any of the Patent Armory Serial Lawsuits would cost substantially more than $95,000."

University of Texas law professor Paul Gugliuzza, who has written extensively about high-volume NPE suits, said Rabicoff is "making millions of dollars $25,000 at a time."

"It's staggering that the model works, but it's legitimately profitable," he said.

Under the Radar

For a lawyer who has been involved in 3,500-plus cases, Rabicoff has largely avoided protracted fights over sanctions that are hardly uncommon in the patent litigation space.

One exception was a 2020 case filed by Cedar Lane Technologies Inc., one of Rabicoff’s most active clients with more than 400 patent suits filed.

The presiding judge sanctioned Rabicoff for failing to get permission to litigate 29 cases in California as an out-of-state lawyer and taking "positions in his filings that were objectively frivolous" and doing so "in bad faith"—by arguing his client was justified in filing third and fourth iterations of its complaint without court permission.

Rabicoff ultimately paid about $10,000 as a fine and the Virginia State Bar, where he was licensed, publicly reprimanded him.

A judge in Dallas in 2022 separately ordered a three-lawyer team including Rabicoff and their client Magnacross LLC to pay $5,000 after the plaintiff "admitted to filing a brief that contained sections copied and pasted from a brief in another case, which referenced different and irrelevant" parts of a patent.

Paul Morinville, an inventor and patent-rights advocate, argued Rabicoff's business model provides one of the only viable paths for less-resourced inventors to get some payment for their work, given the high cost of taking a patent case to trial and the scarcity of people willing to bankroll such suits.

"As a small inventor, if you don’t have 50 patents you're not going to get anywhere" going the traditional route, Morinville said.

Morinville said the only option is a lawyer who looks for "cases where you’ve got 15 or 20 defendants and you're slamming them for small settlements."

"People have said that's patent trolling, but, for the little guys, it's getting the scraps of what's been stolen from them," he said.

Debt Collection

Landis' Denver-based lawyer, Dan Vedra, was an unconventional choice to defend a patent-infringement lawsuit. His bread and butter was representing consumers in disputes with debt collectors. However, he'd also represented Floyd’s of Leadville in a series of business disputes and gotten to know Landis personally as a fellow cycling enthusiast.

To Vedra, the underlying power dynamic in mass patent-infringement litigation didn't seem too different than the one in debt collections.

"Seeing a guy like Isaac Rabicoff filing hundreds of lawsuits doesn't come as much of a surprise to me because, if you've seen how debt collection has changed over 20 years, it's shifted to a few companies that buy up all the unsecured debt in the country and the mass filing of lawsuits."

"As complicated as patent law appears to be from an outsider’s perspective, it doesn't really shock me that you can really systematize it," Vedra said. "It's vindicating to have a client who says 'we'll stand up to this.'"

At first glance, Vedra said, it was tempting to advise Landis to settle. But two things convinced him he had a good case: he had an intern who’d previously worked at the Patent and Trademark Office, and his client had access to a mass spectrometer, an instrument that analyzes the chemical composition of materials.

"Floyd's a really intelligent person and the people who work with him are really intelligent, too, and they don’t let things like this go," Vedra said.

On the Attack

With the help of his intern, Vedra worked up a counter-attack on the merits in a motion to dismiss and later in counterclaims filed with the US District Court for the District of Colorado.

Rabicoff and Metronome, the filings alleged, were sloppy in ways small and big.

Metronome had misidentified itself as a Minnesota corporation instead of a New Mexico LLC in lawsuits against 10 defendants, possibly because it transposed the states' postal abbreviations.

Floyd's of Leadville also contended the patent was invalid because the invention it describes would’ve been obvious at the time it was filed, and was written so broadly that a skilled person wouldn't be able to practice the invention without testing various combinations and concentrations of CBD and lidocaine themselves.

Vedra had Landis test the balm, which gave him confidence it contained amounts of CBD oil and lidocaine that put it outside the scope of Metronome’s patent. In a letter sent to Rabicoff and another Metronome lawsuit target, Vedra argued that the plaintiff misunderstood the balm label and sued based on that mistake. Rabicoff and Metronome would counter that it was "entitled to rely on Floyd’s own 'advertising and labeling' in alleging infringement."

Landis was more interested in revenge than chemistry, though.

Fair Game

Rationalizing that his company was the victim of legalized trolling, he considered trolling Rabicoff fair game.

Looking up web domain name registrations, Landis discovered Rabicoff didn't own the right to a URL under his full name. So, several months after the first email exchanges, Landis acquired it–and designed a homepage with a giant sex toy under the name Empty Legal Threats LLP.

"I couldn't believe he didn't buy his own name," Landis said. "If you're a troll, this is what Internet trolling is."

Asked if he’d built the site anonymously, Landis said, "he’s going to know it's me because I emailed him from it."

Though Rabicoff declined to discuss his cases, he did point Bloomberg Law to the same website, noting that it was created shortly after he filed the Metronome case against Floyd's of Leadville.

Landis also sent Rabicoff a sarcastic "apology”—which the lawyer would call "deranged"—for three earlier emails that included comments about Rabicoff’s paralegal having a "stripper name." “Obviously no self-respecting stripper would ever moonlight as a paralegal for a criminal 'lawyer,' so I hope she will forgive me. I should not have called her that because she isn't one," he wrote.

The email also referenced a rock-climbing photo Rabicoff had posted of himself to social media, with Landis calling the lawyer someone who was "shitting down lawsuits by the thousands upon humanity."

Vedra said he assumed from his past experience that Rabicoff would be caught flat-footed by Floyd’s of Leadville's attack on the merits of the suit. "Debt collectors, they work on an assembly line and if they spend too much time on any particular case that screws up the assembly line."

But Rabicoff did have an answer, one that tried to turn Landis' emails against him.

Escape Hatch

Metronome sent Floyd’s of Leadville a written promise not to sue over the patent again in the future. It then asked the court to dismiss both its lawsuit and Floyd’s of Leadville's counterclaims, which it argued were moot. Rabicoff told the judge Metronome brought its suit "in good faith" but was met with "a pattern of harassment, racial epithets and profane communications."

By walking away, Metronome and Rabicoff eliminated the risk a judge could side with Floyd's of Leadville and invalidate their patent. By the time the two sides filed their last motions, Metronome had suits pending where it was asserting that same patent or a related continuation patent against 10 other cannabis companies.

Meanwhile, Vedra and Landis had to explain the vitriolic emails now aired in a series of exhibits in the public docket.

"I wasn’t necessarily thrilled to have my name pulled into some of the more outrageous things Floyd said. That gave me some heartburn," Vedra said.

"I thought I'd get some kind of admonition from the judge, and, if that happened, so be it," he said. "At the same time, if you're completely withdrawing and waving the white flag and also attacking—most judges see right through that."

Vedra said he and Landis were geared up to keep litigating.

"But they were clever enough to figure out how to get out of the bad situation," he said of Rabicoff and Metronome. "They were prepared and had all the tools and this exit strategy that worked really effectively."

'This Will Not Stand'

Ultimately, the case ended with a fizzle. Judge Nina Y. Wang wrote a six-page order ending the case. While she recited some of Landis' remarks, they weren't part of the judge's analysis.

Since the dismissal of Metronome’s case against Floyd’s of Leadville on Oct. 20, 2025, Rabicoff has kept up his blistering pace, filing more than 300 patent lawsuits.

Landis said his company got through its run-in with Rabicoff mostly unscathed, but said he's concerned about high-volume patent litigation’s effect beyond his business.

"The money these people are making—the cost is getting socialized somehow, and people don’t even know it," he said. "This just adds a cost to everything."

Landis hasn’t completely let go. His Rabicoff-trolling website remains active.

He said he hoped his acts of defiance would either encourage others or, at least, deter other would-be patent plaintiffs from targeting his company.

"Maybe the article needs to be titled: 'this aggression will not stand, man,'" he said via text after the interview, quoting the Dude.