Really? I would have thought a debt collection suit where the debt in question had passed statute of limitations would be damn easy to handle as a defense attorney. What makes them a PITA?
Enjoy,
Steven
If you can get hold of a copy of ‘McLibel’ it is worth watching as it deals specifically with this issue, only with rich corporations. British couple get sued by McDonalds for a flyer they produced criticising McDonalds practices on many different things.
They have no money and legal aid only covers 2 hours and not litigation, so defend themselves and eventually are aided by friendly lawyer. They are at one stage offered money by top execs. Outcome: the judgement is ruled in favour of McDs even though the judge conceeds at least 6 of the items are won by the couple. They are sued for 40,000 pounds. They have no money and McDs never comes to collect or do they get put in jail - due to the negative publicity. McDs spends millions and has a team of lawyers.
Then the couple go to the European court to get a ruling on helping people who are sued but have no money - they win something on this ruling and I’m not so clear what it is, but it acknowledges that it is unfair for rich corporations to used millions sueing people with no money.
I’ve found the website - I got a few details wrong, but see for yourselves:
What would the law spend? Bill Gates would spend money going after it, there would be tons spent in Civil Suits.
Just because you have a judgment, doesn’t mean that you automatically have the money. I think collecting the judgment can be a bigger PITA than getting it sometimes.
Bzzzt. Nice bit of sophistry, but no cigar. The law is different from the other areas in an important respect: it promises justice. There’s a REASON that naked lady with the scales is blindfolded. Strippers, doctors, restaurants and auto manufacturers make no claims WRT justice. The law does.
I think the whole system with releasing people on bail is also probably not very favourable for the poor.
I am not a US resident, so can somebody please explain to me why the whole bail-system is a good thing?
It looks to me to be the epitomy of class justice : you have money?
Okay, then you can take care of stuff until your case comes to trial.
You know : hiring a decent lawyer, getting good character witnesses and the like.
You don’t have any money?
Well, go rot in a jailcell until a public defender screws you over.
Bail is based on your ability to pay. If you have a lot of money, your bail will be proportionally higher. If you are broke, bail will be lower. The idea is that bail will force you to return to the courts so it must be applied with equal levels of “pain” for individuals.
Overall, I’d say “yes.” But there are notable exceptions (ask Martha Stewart about that).
I followed the Baby M Surrogacy case, and “poor” surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead made a big bruhaha over how “rich” William Stern was “buying” HER baby. Never mind the real facts: Mrs. Whitehead had three attorneys to Dr. Stern’s one; six expert witnesses to Dr. Stern’s two (and she had two more that the judge would not let testify); her attorney was working pro bono (Dr. Stern’s was not), and Mr. Whitehead was only making $9,000 a year less than Dr. Stern and Mrs. Whitehead did work on occasion. To this day, Mrs. Whitehead-Gould claims she lost custody of the child because she had less money than Dr. Stern.
On paper it’s a piece of cake, but in actual practice it can be a huge hassle, to the point where many lawyers either can’t or won’t do it or would have to charge you cost prohibitive fees to do so.
To begin with, it can be difficult to even get to that point. Let’s say you live in Corpus Christi and get served notice of a suit being filed against you in Dallas for an old credit card debt. The suit has alleged Dallas as the proper county of venue, but it’s not really - Corpus is. Dallas is just where the plaintiff’s law firm is located. Your suit was just one of several dozens they filed that day on behalf of some company you never heard of who claims to have purchased your old credit card debt, except the amount they’re claiming is over twice what you remember owing, plus $2000 in attorney’s fees, a figure that probably came straight out of their ass. You have until the first Monday after the expiration of 20 days to do something about it.
You consult several lawyers in Corpus and all of them agree that their venue allegations are bullshit, but none of them will take the case. They could file a motion to transfer venue and the judge might transfer it immediately, but they might also set it for a hearing, which means you and your lawyer will have to drive to Dallas for the hearing…and if the judge refuses to transfer it for some reason, your Corpus lawyer may be stuck on a case in a Dallas court. This is either impossible for him or cost prohibitive for you, and he suggests that you find a Dallas lawyer. The problem is that none of the Dallas lawyers you talk to will work on the case if venue is transferred to Corpus, so you either have to defend the case in a city that’s six hours away or pay two sets of lawyers. You’ll probably do what most people do, which is nothing. The plaintiff’s firm gets a default judgment on you even if the debt was barred by the statute of limitations.
Let’s say you do find someone who’ll work on the case, and is willing to go to a venue hearing in Dallas just out of spite. Your lawyer files an answer and motion to transfer in the same document. The judge immediately sets the case for mediation, which is a smart move for him because it encourages people to settle pronto. For you, it sucks, because it costs $700. Your lawyer gets a call from the appointed mediator’s office from a secretary wanting to know when would be a good time to schedule mediation. Your lawyer responds “sometime after my venue hearing, please.” She says she didn’t notice any venue hearing scheduled, which your lawyer ponts out is kind of the friggin’ problem. After a few more heated calls she just sets it anyway and tells you to be there Friday after next. Your lawyer can’t get the court administrator on the phone to find out why the venue hearing isn’t scheduled, and doesn’t get a call back until he sends several exasperated letters to the judge and all parties objecting to court ordered mediation in the wrong county of venue with no discovery. Eventually the administartor calls to say she never saw a motion to transfer venue on file, at which time your lawyer wearliy points out that it was in the answer.
So you case gets transferred (or not, but we’ll say it has). You don’t believe there’s been any activity on the account within the last four years, but you’re not sure and you can’t prove it because you didn’t save the statements. Your lawyer asks them for the documents that would prove activity on the account within the time frame, and they send him some crap from a computer screen they could have made up. This is because the company suing you isn’t the credit card company - it’s the company who bought the debt from the company who bought the debt from the comapny who bought the debt from the credit card company, for pennies on the dollar. This puts them in some very, very serious problems with proving the case; they bought thousands of these debts for pennies on the dollar, but may or may not be able to factually prove any individual debt. They don’t want to, really, they just want thousands of default judgments. In fact, you’re the first person who ever actually answered one of their suits, and they’re a little surprised. They may not even realize that they have problems with proving their case. Worse yet, a judge or jury may not realize their proof should be legally insufficient, so in settlement negotiations you’re sort of playing chicken with them, in the age old game of who wants to go to trial? When conversing with the condescending plaintiff’s attorney, or his condescending associate, or his condescending associate’s condescending clerk, or his condescending associate’s condescending clerk’s condescending secretary, your lawyer will at some point rub his eyes very hard and undertstand for the first time why some people hate lawyers.
Dude, I think your nipple clamp just shorted out.
Some things in the legal system definitely work against big corporations. Think about punitive damages awards for product liability, for example. Or class actions where the fees are on a contingency basis - basically an invitation to sue big corporations.
pravnik, yikes! I was thinking a quick motion to dismiss with a citation to the statute of limitations would be all that was necessary. But of course finding the right venue and all that procedural stuff comes first. I’ll have to ask my friend(who is a country lawyer out of Cisco) if he ever takes those kinds of cases. Might make for some interesting stories during our card game tomorrow night.
Enjoy,
Steven
You don’t think there’d be punitive damages if an individual person made a faulty product that caused as much damage as the big corporation’s product?
Of course.
But unless one has the assistance of magic elves, or the “product” in question was an atomic bomb, I think it a rather unlikely senario in actual practice. 
Then I find it hard to see how this “works against” big corporations. I mean, a Ferrari owner is more capable of breaking the speed limit than a Yugo owner, but that doesn’t mean the speeding laws are biased against people who own sports cars.
Not sure what your point is.
That’s like saying that laws specifically forbidding sleeping under bridges don’t “target” the poor, isn’t it?
Things like punitive damages and class action rules were designed or applied with the express purpose of addressing the power imbalance between between individual consumers and big, powerful corporations. Doesn’t that in some way indicate that not all law favours the big guy?
That’s a pretty good point… but I wonder: who’s more likely to get a big settlement against a corporation- a poor schlub, or a rich guy? I’d think the rich guy- again, it comes down to resources, and he’s got more than the guy making minimum wage.
Again, though, it seems like the only big winner is the lawyer.
Allow me to play devil’s advocate for a moment here…
OK, you got me on that one. But I note you do not have a ready response to the rest of my post.
The problem with being rich is that you are a juicier target.
Is it just me, or does the witch hunt the RIAA & MPAA are going on remind anyone of the Inquisition, or at least McCarthyism?
“Do you now download, or have you ever downloaded, music and/or movies you didn’t pay for?”