In the U.S.? As a litigator, I call bullshit. Unless there's a statutory basis for fees, you're paying for the case unless its frivolous under Rule 11 (which pretty much never happens).
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Man Sues Ubisoft Over Assassins Creed
- Thread starter HardOCP News
- Start date
In the U.S.? As a litigator, I call bullshit. Unless there's a statutory basis for fees, you're paying for the case unless its frivolous under Rule 11 (which pretty much never happens).
In the U.S.? As a litigator, I call bullshit. Unless there's a statutory basis for fees, you're paying for the case unless its frivolous under Rule 11 (which pretty much never happens).
A loser pays system (or even a "plaintiff pays on loss" system) is far too broken and biased toward corporations to work, but our system could definitely use a way to help prevent defendants from paying exorbitant legal fees to defend against career plaintiffs.
My first thought would be that the burden of legal fees should be routinely decided by the jury, at their discretion: We trust them with the verdict and award calculation after all, and the burden of legal fees must also be decided in a similarly context-sensitive manner, so that makes the jury the most natural arbiter IMO. Context in this case includes both the size/wealth of the plaintiff relative to the defendant, as well as the degree to which each party is in the wrong or in the right. (After all, it's common for a defendant to be partially, but not wholly, to blame.)
That said, this discretion should probably be limited to whether the plaintiff must pay the defendant's fees (in whole or in part). The defendant should never have to pay the plaintiff's fees...at least not unless the plaintiff is found to be clearly in the right, after a much wealthier defendant tried dragging the trial out and defeating the defendant through lawyer fee attrition. The last thing we need is for corporations and groups like the RIAA to get their lawyer fees added to the ridiculous amounts they successfully sue people for.
It would also help if fixed costs to corporations were discounted from the calculation of legal fees: If a corporation permanently employs entire teams of lawyers (or permanently contracts them), their salaries are not solely a cost of defending against a particular plaintiff, since they would have been paid regardless.
...of course, it would also help if we got rid of the medieval guild system for attorneys, which artificially drives up the cost of representation, and which is "justified" through increasingly complex laws that make extensive specialized education far more essential than it should be...