Lawfare is the deliberate subjection of an entity to excessive and unnecessary legal action in order to silence them and destroy what they stand for.
A current example would be the lawfare against Valve, from several parties like the State of New York and the government of the United Kingdom. This is likely happening because Valve is one of the few remaining privately owned technology corporations, and as a result have not gotten on board with ID verification on their platform, Steam. This makes the oligarchs and governments very angry, seeing the company as an obstruction of their goal of mass surveillance and data harvesting, and as a result, they seek to destroy them through lawfare or force Valve to comply with the bullshit.