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Comment by chuckee | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like an open and shut case of false advertising, a crime.

Sure, got a few million dollars to bring a lawsuit knowing that if it starts go somewhere they'll issue a 3-line patch and blame the intern for not testing it?

I know it's just a saying, but I feel the need to de-mistify this.

Lawsuits don't cost millions. Court fees are absolutely never that high, and lawyers, while some may be expensive, are generally affordable for ~middle class (or even lower class if someone wants to do pro-bono work for you)

The whole "lawsuits cost millions" thing is a myth perpetuated by big corporations and further relied by normal folk who hear it from somewher else, which probably heard it from somewhere else, and so on.

When you read in the news "X company wasted $XX million in legal fees", what it actually means is "they stretched out the case with a team of very expensive corporate lawyers whoses price ranges are in the millions".

> The whole "lawsuits cost millions" thing is a myth

That may be, but they can easily cost many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lawyers typically bill at multiple hundreds of dollars an hour so it doesn't take a lot of hours to rack up five- or six-figure costs. That's high-stakes poker for most people.

I once sued a neighbor for their barking dog. It cost me over $10,000 before I pulled the plug.

https://blog.rongarret.info/2009/07/dog-days.html

I don't understand how you think this is solely one-sided.

> "they stretched out the case with a team of very expensive corporate lawyers whoses price ranges are in the millions".

Yes - The company stretched the case out with expensive lawyers: Do you think the other side is somehow not obligated to also continue dealing with that case?

Who pays my lawyer while the company stretches the case out? Oops - that's still me.

----

As someone who has actually retained a lawyer for dealing with a previous employer:

1 - Most places had zero interest if the money at play was less than 100k (ie: They would not take the case unless I had a potential win of 100k or more)

2 - They charge ~$350 an hour. Sometimes billing for "intern" work at ~$150 an hour instead. I make good money (~200k) and I can afford less than 23 days of lawyer time a year, assuming I spend my ENTIRE yearly income on it.

You're right that lawsuits don't always cost millions. However, they will cost at minimum tens of thousands of dollars. Filing fees are generally a few hundred dollars per document, and median lawyers' fees are somewhere around $300/hr, depending on jurisdiction. And--in the US--it is generally expected that you pay your lawyer's fees whether you won or lost.

The advice I have gotten from actual lawyers is that it's literally not worth it if you expect to get only a few thousand dollars.

This is why we need robot laywers that can Sue-as-a-Service for $5/hr. Just log into the website, type in who you want to sue, why you want to sue them, and it should take care of the rest. With enough proceedings from past cases it should be possible to train an algorithm to create the defense that is most likely to win.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really work. While there's a lot of court documents that are going to be highly formulaic and could plausibly be written almost Mad Libs style, there are several court documents that are going to rely very heavily on the unique factual nature of the case. Responses and replies to motions are going to fall into that latter category almost universally.

What about just funding public prosecutors? (Or rather more funding for public prosecutors)

Okay, yes, hopefully that's hyperbole but it's still a LOT more than most people are going to want to spend — that's why this works: if they were trying to take your house, sure, you'd lawyer up but when it's more like a principled stand on privacy, an awful lot of people are going to reasonably conclude that it's not worth the cost. This is the advantage to having, say, a government privacy regulator which has lawyers on staff whose entire job is to do things like this.

This is especially work considering with this particular company, which has a history of using legal threats to silence critics:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-against-proctorio

I would DEFINITELY not jump at the chance to incur a similar reaction.

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