Self-dealing by someone connected to the state, yes. Extortion, no.

It takes a fair amount of money to take a court case to the Supreme Court. You can pay it all (and still maybe lose), or you can let the law firm have part of what you win. This happens all the time in the US legal system. It's not extortion; it's essentially venture funding by the law firm. (Yes, I'm aware of the pattern in the previous sentence, but I'm in fact a human, and not even LLM-assisted.) If the company doesn't want to play that way, they don't have to. They can pay the full cost of the lawsuit themselves.

Litigation funding is essentially just another asset class for investors:

https://thehedgefundjournal.com/the-emerging-market-for-liti...