Julian McMillan wants nothing to do with Yelp. He runs a small law firm in San Diego, California, focusing on bankruptcy law. And yet his business, like many others, has an entry on the reviews site.

But on Tuesday, McMillan was served with a lawsuit from Yelp, alleging breach of contract, intentional interference with contract, unfair competition, and false advertising. In short, McMillan is being sued over supposed false Yelp reviews posted from 2010 to 2012. The lawsuit was filed in late August 2013.

“It has no merit,” he told Ars. “I assure you I never asked anyone to do that.”

Why would Yelp suddenly focus on a small target when presumably fake Yelp reviews are happening on a daily basis across its site? In fact, this is the second such case involving Yelp suing a business over supposed fake reviews.

Curiously, Yelp’s lawsuit against McMillan was filed just days before a San Diego superior court judge was supposed to rule on Yelp’s appeal of a small claims case that McMillan filed against Yelp. The initial small claims judge likened Yelp's practices to the Mafia, a fact that was highlighted in a local news segment on this story. (As a result of this initial ruling, McMillan is now soliciting others in similar circumstances.)

On August 26, 2013, the appellate judge dismissed the case and mandated that the parties seek binding arbitration.

“We continue to take an aggressive stance against business owners who are attempting to mislead consumers through fake reviews,” Kristen Whisenand, a Yelp spokesperson, told Ars, noting that the company has previously sued BuyYelpReview.com.

“This is the second complaint we have filed against a business related to deceptive reviews,” she said. Whisenand added that Yelp’s lawsuit against McMillan was “completely separate from the small claims court case" that has been ongoing for months.

“They’re trying to drag my name through the mud”

For years, Yelp has been publicly accused of extortion—asking for money from businesses that are automatically listed on the site, whether they wish to be or not, in exchange for preferred placement on the site. There are also accusations of abruptly vanishing positive reviews and suddenly appearing negative reviews.

McMillan hired Yelp to provide advertising services in 2012 after receiving a cold call from an ad sales representative.

“I agreed to pay them just so they wouldn't start posting negative reviews on my Yelp page,” he said. McMillian claimed to hear previous allegations of what he called Yelp’s “extortion” tactics.

After getting into a dispute as to what services would be provided, McMillan asked to simply be removed from the site.

“The response comes back that they deem it important for people to find me on Yelp,” he told Ars. “Why do they get to make that decision? If I don’t want my company on a billboard, I don’t put it on a billboard. I can opt-out of the phone book. This company feels that they have the right to use my trademark trade name on their website and they hide behind the Communications Decency Act when it comes to businesses that complain about false reviews on their pages.”

Yelp says its policy is to not remove business listings.

“They’ve complained about these reviews that date back to 2010 that were immediately removed from my page by Yelp, and subsequent to that they seek me out as an advertiser in 2012?” McMillan added. “If I’m so damaging to them why didn’t they just remove me? It’s lose-lose—like most litigation—for both of us. They’re trying to drag my name through the mud. They really don't seem to care, which tells me that the substance of my lawsuit, I must have really struck a nerve.”

Quid pro quo?

Ars attempted to contact several of the people mentioned in the suit to see if they were real people or fraudulent as Yelp accuses. Only one would comment on the record. The San Francisco company accuses former McMillan employees, four clients, and other San Diego-area lawyers as writing fraudulent or dishonest Yelp reviews on McMillan’s behalf, a charge that McMillan denies.

Andrew Boylan, a San Diego attorney who used to work for McMillan, is specifically named as having written a September 2010 Yelp comment as "Exceeded expectations" in a review of the McMillan Law Group. This date coincides with Boylan's employment at the same firm. When reached by e-mail, Boylan declined to comment.

Bob Wish, a 74-year-old man who runs a real estate investment company and uses McMillan as his attorney, told Ars that he did write a Yelp review for McMillan on December 30, 2010 as the suit alleges. The suit, however, accuses McMillan of writing the review himself.

Wish said that he was at McMillan’s office for an annual holiday brunch, and when he walked in after 8am that morning, he saw “around a half dozen people” there. A few were typing away on computers.

“I said hello, and I asked what they were doing, and [McMillan] said they’re writing up reviews for me,” Wish said. “I wasn’t told imperatively to write a review. I said: ‘You’ve helped me win these lawsuits, so I’ll be glad to tell them what you’ve done for me.’”

When Ars asked Yelp if Wish’s review, as he described it, would be in violation of the company’s terms of service, the company didn’t directly answer.

“Mr. McMillan will have the opportunity to present his defense in court and the court will decide based on the evidence presented,” Whisenand told Ars.

So what would McMillan's preferred outcome be to settle the case once and for all?

"Everybody walks away—they remove all references to me on Yelp and I do the same and they go on their merry way," he said.