Another non-lawyer here… but one who has hired and is still paying a real lawyer for a divorce proceeding. Don’t underestimate how expensive a trial can be, nor overestimate how likely you’ll be to win.
My ex and I have about $110,000 to split. Of course we both feel entitled to more than 50%. My lawyer has advised me to seriously consider taking a deal that may not be what I want or could get in a judgement… simply to avoid trial. For a matter like ours it will take 2-3 days to argue in court, and cost up to $60,000 in legal fees win or lose. For each side. Just a simple family court trial will basically cost us everything there is to win.
Most cases don’t go to court because the people involved take the wise advice to settle in advance and avoid a full blown trial. My lawyer has more work than she knows what to do with and really doesn’t need to milk any clients. She’d much rather sign a few documents and charge $2000 and be done with it. Taking a deal your lawyer is often a smart thing to do.
As requested, non-lawyer checking in. I do have two experiences with taking another party to court, one tangentially when my late spouse sued someone in the UK for attempting to steal his musical instrument design and another when I sued a former employer for wage theft. This does not make me an expert, just someone with a dollop of experience.
Let me throw this out: It’s one thing to get a judgement against someone else, it’s another thing entirely to collect the money.
OK, onward.
OK, they’re allowed to sue anyone, but while Mr. Pedophile is unquestionably guilty guilty guilty that does not automatically mean that the facility in question will be found guilty in a trial. Between the circumstances involved and the (presumed) team of lawyers on the side of the facility the actual facility may or may not be found at all culpable. There are no guarantees when you go to trial. Remember that.
When my spouse consulted a lawyer about an international lawsuit the first thing the lawyer said was “How much justice can you afford?” which, needless to say, was not what we wanted to hear - but it what we needed to hear. That sentence encapsulated the reality of the situation. Pursuit of our case in court was going to cost a crapton of money win or lose - with, again, no guarantee we’d win or that if we won we’d be able to collect.
What the lawyer is advising (it seems to me) is that settling for this designated amount is as close to guaranteed as anyone is going to get. It’s probably the least expense, the least aggravation, and the least delay in getting compensation. If your friends go to trial they might get nothing, even if, to their side, the case looks like a slam dunk.
I don’t know all the details here, but if a lawyer suggested “settle” I’d at least take a look at the deal, the reasoning behind that advice, and possibly get a second opinion.
This has already been covered - the company might be heavily in debt, there might be layers of ownership providing protection to the company, and as I noted if you go to trial the court might decree that the company wasn’t liable, only the individual who commited the criminal acts was.
Assuming it was a criminal trial, all the trial of Mr. Pedophile did was prove that HE was guilty - it did not establish guilt for the company he worked for (unless I’m missing something here, which I might be). For damn sure the company’s lawyers will be arguing something along that line.
I’m not entirely sure how that is relevant.
I hire a lawyer to hear a lawyer’s advice. I don’t always like what I hear, and I don’t always hear what I want to hear, but I do expect any lawyer I pay to be honest with me. The first sort of “balls” I want a lawyer to have is the balls to tell me the truth and tell me what I need to hear, even if it’s the opposite of what I want to hear. Otherwise, why hire a lawyer in the first place? If I’m just going to bull ahead insisting I know better than an actual expert why hire the expert? Of course, I might ask for a second opinion, but if I keep hearing the same thing over and over, well, might be time for me to suck it up and deal with reality.
I’ve never met a competent lawyer who was actually eager to go to court. As I said, no trial has a guaranteed outcome. Going to trial is expensive as well as time-consuming. And even if you get a judgement collecting it may be difficult to impossible. What good would a million dollar award from a jury be if I can’t collect more than a $1.50 of it?
When I sued a former employer for wage theft we tried to settle with the other party but the other party basically told us to fuck off and go to hell. So I sued. And it was a slam dunk and the judge awarded the maximum penalties allowed by law. Yay! 20 minutes after we entered the courtroom I was owed seven times what I had been before the day in court.
I collected about 1/6th of it before said guilty party disappeared. No more money. Now, in that particular case I wasn’t entirely unhappy, because I got all I was originally owed and a bit more so win for me. But it took years to drag even that much out of the guilty party. Also, the judge ruled that ONLY one person in the company was guilty, no one else, so there was no one else to sue. Like I said, in that particular case I was satisfied.
But if I had been going up against a very large company with far more in resources than I had and was offered a settlement, or my lawyer suggested a settlement, I’d definitely consider it because going through an actual lawsuit was no fun at all and kept ripping the scab off the hurt that had been done to me - and that was just a few months’ lost wages. If I had been sexually molested? Holy fuck, having to revisit that over and over and over… for months or years… I just can’t imagine.
That fact is, with sexual abuse there really isn’t justice in the sense of right the wrong. My case was easy - I was out money, so just give me money. Molestation? That’s not fixable. Even best outcome - the victim works through therapy, has minimal PTSD/issues, and has a happy and successful life - there will be lifetime scars. So, if the best outcome is “lots of money” but that still won’t really fix the situation (although being able to pay for good therapy is a bonus) then it’s a question of “do you really want to go through all that a trial entails, with no guarantee of a win” vs. “OK, maybe it’s not the maximum possible money but you can get it quick, you can definitely get it, and you won’t have to rehash this shit anymore, it will finish quickly and not drag out for years” I can probably make an argument for either side. So it comes down to what your friend (and the other victims) prefer.
Whichever she chooses I’d keep any opinions different than that to myself and support her in her choice.
You apparently are not an attorney and do not recall correctly. It is much more nuanced than a simple “does not cover judgments”. Actually bankruptcy will discharge most lawsuit judgements. There are exceptions…negligence is not an exception.
Negligence is not, but willful and malicious injury is. Courts will typically look quite broadly at this exception, but we will need to know a lot more about the case before judging whether it would be a non-discharagble debt. In all likelihood, it wouldn’t matter anyway. If the facility goes into Chapter 7, the creditors would get the facility’s assets, and nothing more, unless there are individuals that also have liabity. There are no discharges in business Chapter 7s: the company’s assets would be liquidated and disbursed to unsecured creditors after the secured lenders and priority creditors (taxes and lawyers) get their pieces. If multiple victims are suing the facility, everyone would probably get a few cents on the dollar, at most.
I think the plaintiffs in this case would have a huge leap to prove willful and malicious intent on the part of the organization to molest children through the instrument of one employee.
Agreed which is why I wouldn’t word the suit that way. Its not such a stretch to say for example that a facility that has reports that their staff member is harming children and didn’t stop it was taking a willful step. Not such a step to say that the code of regulations for a facility is to do a background check and they willfully hired a convicted offender (again just an example). Not such a step to say that the regulations required x number of staff for the facility, but the company willfully made the decision to understaff to save money which allowed the molestation to happen. I could think of a number of examples. But, again, it doesn’t matter because its a standard for discharge exceptions, and there is no discharge for businesses.