I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the legal standard is "reckless disregard for the truth", which seems like it has been met.
An entire legal team is not needed to litigate a simple case against Google, that's just not how the legal system works...
The printer screwed up the ad, it was supposed to read "Works on contingency? No, money down!"
It has nothing to do with the merits of the case itself the tactic a company like Google employs is to just file reams of paperwork, discovery, delays, motion for this and that and each of them have to be considered and discussed and pushes thibgs out at least another day or two. They then use this tactic to extend cases into years.
Although a lawyer will work for a certain cut of the reward they need to eat in the meantime and won't because the case isn't being completed, and isn't going to trial, plus it eats up an enormous amount of time and effort for the lawyer involved cutting into other potential cases.
Eventually you have to call it quits and Google wins because the case never went to trial because Googles legal army was able to delay everything by abusing the legal system.
In short as the PHB from Dilbert once said "we're using the law to keep justice away."
That's what's happening right now.
You can go look at cases involving Last Name v Alphabet on the recap archive, they are typically represented by a single attorney. Below are a few examples, I manually filtered out pro-se actions with no attorneys, and class actions, but other then that just went through the list of cases looking for cases with titles fitting the format:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8060229/parties/el-mawa...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6237000/parties/gottlie...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8054663/parties/olson-v...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8067002/parties/lee-v-g...
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8133814/parties/kaufman...
Your links would be more convincing if some of these were successful, completely cases.
The question is not, can you sue Google/Alphabet without a team of lawyers, but can you _successfully_ sue them.
30% of nothing is nothing.
Can you explain why the writer would get _any money at all_?
What financial losses have they suffered? Are they being defamed? Has it affected their reputation?
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Civil courts can't fix things like this! It will never be worth Google's time to correct these mistakes unless they are forced to by the government.
Searching the Internet finds thousands of cases against Google, 95%+ of which are settled in Google's favor. In fact, I only found one successful case like this, in 2012, but it was in Australia which has stronger rules on defamation, and Google had also implied that the plaintiff was a major figure in organized crime, not "simply" got the photo wrong.
https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/milorad-trkulja-austral...