James W. “Wes” Christian is loaded for bear, and after five years he may just have lit on the best method for hunting it. Speaking in a telephone interview, the lawyer delivers his buckshot in a southern drawl. He accuses his opponents of “selling artificial shares” and “rigging short selling.” He bemoans the fate of the “poor buyer who paid hard money” for stocks only to see their value evaporate. He charges the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a target of some of his lawsuits, with being a lapdog of investors “owned by Wall Street.”

Welcome to the world of short-selling litigation. The recent indictment of Milberg Weiss and two of its partners on charges related to the firm’s pursuit of big-money shareholder lawsuits is shining the light on one seedy side of class action lawsuits. But at the same time Milberg Weiss was allegedly raking it in underhandedly, other class-action lawyers have been developing strategies to make money off the stock markets without the hassle of investing. Bear hunting, they seem to hope, will prove not only legal but both fun and lucrative.

The bears Mr. Christian and his collaborator, John O’Quinn, are after are short sellers, that subset of investors who make money by betting that shares will go down in value. Such bears are being targeted in high profile lawsuits filed by Overstock.com and Biovail. At first only noticed by the rarefied world of hedge funds, transaction clearing houses, and the financial press (Carol Redmond of the Dow Jones newswires has been especially astute), these cases now are landing on the evening news, garnering sympathetic airings on programs like Dateline and 60 Minutes.

At the heart of the growing cyclone of shortselling litigation sit Messrs. Christian and O’Quinn. Over the years, the pair has enjoyed its greatest successes in litigation, like tobacco and asbestos, where complex facts combine with big corporations to create opportunities to stand in front of judges and juries and spin scary-sounding stories that are difficult for lawyers and experts to refute without resort to highly technical analyses that put juries to sleep.

Mr.Christian is betting that “naked” shorting won’t put juries to sleep, which may be why he loves to talk about it. Ordinary shorting, in which the short seller borrows a stock, sells it, and then buys it back, hopefully at a lower price, to repay the original loan, is perfectly legal. Naked shorting, in which the trader sells a stock he has not borrowed, rarely is.

As Mr. Christian tells it, the short-selling cases first started in 2001, when another member of his church came up to him one day with a complaint. The man owned a small-cap business and short sellers seemed to be attacking it. As best anyone could tell, they were doing it by naked shorting. Could Mr. Christian help?

Since then, Messrs. Christian and O’Quinn have filed 12 different cases involving 10 different companies in jurisdictions around the country. The firm has drafted another five cases it says it’s on the verge of filing in state courts in Florida, Nevada, Oregon, California, and Pennsylvania. Another 10 cases are in the planning stages. Mr. Christian expects the total number to reach 50 by the end of this year, or March 2007 at the latest. The lawyers are investing heavily in this litigation. They’ve spent, by Mr. Christian’s reckoning, $25 million thus far preparing cases that have yet to go to trial; a few have even been dismissed. Clearly Messrs. Christian and O’Quinn think they have a winning formula here.

Which would mark the first time some of the companies at issue have been “winners” in any normal sense of the word. Most of the cases involve penny stocks traded in the over-the-counter market. In some cases, 10-K filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission include phrases like “Our auditors’ opinion on our financial statements … calls attention to substantial doubts as to our ability to continue as a going concern.”

In other words, if Mr. Christian can convince a judge and jury in any of these cases, he will have found a way to profit from a dog of a stock by going after the traders who barked at it. The allegations these firms and their lawyers levy against short sellers have changed over time and depend on the company (the strategy’s evolving and developing as they go along, Mr. Christian says) but invariably involve stock manipulation, often, at least at first, as part of alleged broader predatory financing schemes. Which again would mean the lawyers are finding ways to make money from companies so shaky they needed to contemplate distress financing in the first place.

Mr. Christian still faces some significant hurdles.A few of his cases have survived motions to dismiss, but others have not. He claims discovery is proceeding nicely on some of them. He will still need to convince judges and juries that he has a case, even though economic logic won’t necessarily be on his side; almost all of his companies, after all, will walk into court carrying a lot of business baggage of their own.

Mr. Christian and his colleagues appear to be filing suits in courts around the country, presumably in the hope of finding a venue that’s amenable. Despite his mixed record thus far in the actual courtroom, he’s learning how to make headway in the court of public opinion, transforming litigation involving an obscure trading practice and companies no one had ever heard of into a Dateline special involving two well-known going concerns whose stocks are more widely dispersed. This new litigation trend is gathering steam. Hang on to your hats, and your shorts.