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Comment by waqf | Hacker News Reader

As I understand it, what usually happens to small-claims cases against large, well-funded corporations is that you win the first round, then the corporation appeals and suddenly you're in grown-up court and have to pay a lawyer.

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Assuming the corporation is fueled by money, it will need to weigh the cost of waging an appeal versus the expected savings in overturning the lawsuit (which is still not guaranteed).

Yes. I was thinking of the case where if you win, thousands of people will file similar suits against the same company.

In such a case, the company has more at stake than you do. It's more likely that it's not worth your while to get a lawyer to fight the appeal.

That's the brilliant thing about the flash-mob approach. If the company has 50 cases to litigate, it may not matter if every individual is self-represented, since the company is going to have a very hard time fielding enough lawyers.

...or 50 non-lawyers since it's small claims.

Especially if they get flash-mobbed like she's calling for. Since they would need to show up at so many places to be able to even try to appeal. Some jurisdictions don't take kindly to not showing up to small claims court and then trying to appeal a default position against you.

In a case I read about recently, the megacorp sent a paralegal with zero pertinent knowledge to represent them in small claims. (I think it was on HN — does anybody remember what I'm talking about?)

Google did this, but it wasn't recently -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=505255

Thanks, that's the one I was thinking of.

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