Someone with 500k and a few employed certainly has money. This story was sheer luck and is only showing off that.
At least the author's frank about it.
So they won't sue but they have internal processes that say everybody must sign "The Contract".
He made his $400k and hired the employee much later.
Unless you cause an egregious 50k+ of damage, suing is probably idiotic. And how can that even happen? The client would/should refuse to make the last payment if the work sucks. ("So sue me" works in both directions.) So it has to be a nearly complete fail for suing to make much sense.
It could be possible to run across a very incompetent executive who is desperate for a scapegoat...but that is probably rare. Such a suit is unlikely to see the inside of a courtroom, because it is a delaying tactic of an executive whose career is probably already circling the drain.
Is there any way to formalize expressions like "he knows more about X than you know about Y", where X and Y are different domains? Is there a way to quantify it, to answer questions like "how much more"? Do we have any kind of well-defined "unit of knowledge"?
Does anyone here knows of relevant math branch that talks about these questions?
A measure is a function on the subsets of a space which yields a non-negative real number. For example, a measure of the triangle with vertices (0,0), (2,0), and (6,0), is 6, the area of that triangle. Measure satisfies certain nice properties, such as if A is a subset of B, then the measure of A is no more than the measure of B.
So, I guess if you can define a reasonable measure on the spaces X and Y, you can measure collections of X and collections of Y, and use the real numbers to determine which is "more".
But this doesn't strike me as useful in any way other than the fun of abstract mathematics. :-)
It's one thing to be threatened with a lawsuit, but it's another matter once the paperwork is filed.
When I was hit with a revenge suit during the first bubble, the single, asset-free me had a different reaction than some of my peers who had families and much more to lose.
There's a lot of psychological warfare going on. When a process server shows up at your doorstep and serves papers to your spouse at your partially-paid-for house, things take a turn. Any sense of righteous defiance you might have starts to waver at this point.
The plaintiff in my situation got a lot for the 20-30K they probably spent on suing us. Without going to court, they shut down an entire company and made over a half-dozen people unemployed -- edit: while making them pay for their own legal fees too --. And they got the satisfaction of a "moral" victory for chump change. Never mind that most of their claims were bunk.
So, in a nutshell, it's not always about going to court.