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> The named plaintiffs, Marciano and Kissner, will receive $7,500 each and Liss-Riordan will get up to $1.25 million. The approximately 33,744 class members wil

by khazhou 10y ago

> The named plaintiffs, Marciano and Kissner, will receive $7,500 each and Liss-Riordan will get up to $1.25 million. The approximately 33,744 class members will receive payment as part of the settlement. The lawyer gets $1.25 million and the people supposedly impacted get $125 each. I don't what erudite Hacker News-worthy comment to make except... SMH.

M_Grey 10y ago
$125 isn't even that bad, as class actions go... it really is a wildly crooked system.
- pmiller2 10y ago
  I was surprised they got that much. About $3.50 and some Arby's coupons would have been more typical.
DannyBee 10y ago
Now, some amounts are egregious, but remember the lawyers are fronting literally all of the cost here. They don't get it back if they lose, either. It's kind of like complaining a vc made 500x what you did on an IPO. I also think hacker news has no concept of what a large lawsuit like this costs. if they spend 20 bucks a class member on everything from locating them to location to answering questions to handling claims, that's 50% of that 1.25 million right there. That doesn't include the actual billable hour cost of the lawsuit, which for large and complex lawsuits, is ridiculous. At the same time, hilariously, people here are against class arbitration (which would pay lawyers dramatically less and claimants more), and pretty much every other solution. It appears they just think "lawyers should be paid less, but work harder to get others money". IE they want a system where there are class actions, and the companies are made to hurt, but nobody else other than the people in the class make money. The truth is most of these claims are worthless entirely, and people don't deserve squat. So $125 is infinitely more than they should have gotten. (i'm sure someone will come along with no understanding of contract damages and claim the class members deserve billions) Are some valuable? Sure. Do some serve a valuable purpose of deterrent? Again, sure. But that's like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 of all class action lawsuits right now. Check out most class action lawfirm case lists, for example, and see how many you think are really deserving of more than nominal damages or "please fix this issue for us". Think about how many of them are the moral equivalent of bugs you've made in software before that is sold or used by other people. Do you think you should be paying millions? Personally, I can't wait for the day when liability for software bugs comes and everyone here immediately changes their mind and decides most of these kinds of lawsuits are probably not worth as much as they thought :) In the meantime, people starting worse-than-useless startups appear to be deserving of untold billions, and startups doing the same type of thing (eg making infinite multiples of their workers, who basically make squat) are a-okay. BTW, fun fact: Class action lawyers, on average, work much worse hours than startup engineers.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  The truth is most of these claims are worthless entirely, and people don't deserve squat. So $125 is infinitely more than they should have gotten. ...Then all the more reason the lawyers who helped them bring the suit in the first place don't deserve to be paid for empowering said fraud.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Lawyers do what their clients pay them to do. If you want to make a dent, you need to get clients to stop believing they should earn money for this. Punishing the middlemen is unlikely to achieve much, as reprehensible as you may find them. It's like arresting drug dealers instead of trying to get people to stop taking drugs in the first place. Until you stop demand, ...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - M_Grey 10y ago
      The clients didn't pay them...
- pkaye 10y ago
  If you want liability protection for software bugs you just have to be willing to pay the appropriate amount to achieve it.
- linuxkerneldev 10y ago
  > remember the lawyers are fronting literally all of the cost here. What does that tell us about the way our legal system works?
  - Shivetya 10y ago
    that it does work? how else would this work? someone claims a grievance and needs assistance to settling the dispute. by having this option of a lawyer(group/individual) front the cost it lets anyone bring a viable dispute to the table. It shakes out the frivolous from taking up the time of the courts. It also insures those suing have standing which can be difficult except when facing corporate entity. Against government a common ploy is to claim the plaintiffs don't have standing and without a private agency to go to bat for a group it can be real difficult to move forward? Government intervention? How would that work? Worse I can imagine all sorts of ways that it would be abused. Look at how much frivolous suits are in the system filed by those who don't to put any skin into the game
pat_space 10y ago
That's a little under 23% of the total judgement. What do you think a law firm should take %-wise from lawsuits like these? Should there be a cap? 5% is ~$274k, but the people impacted would still only get ~$154 at that percentage. Even if the lawyers did the case pro bono, each participant would only get ~$162. Math: (1,250,000 + 15,000) + (33,744 * 125) = 5,483,000 1,250,000 / 5,483,000 = 0.227977385 .05 * 5,483,000 = 274,150 (.95 * 5,483,000)/33,744 = 154.363739 5483000/33744 = 162.4881460407776
- M_Grey 10y ago
  I suspect the point is that if the only group which is in any way meaningfully enriched are the lawyers, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system. ...A system lobbied for, and legislated by said lawyers.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    That's exactly the wrong take away. We've privatized law enforcement. Your complaint is said private law enforcement needs to be paid, not just for the work she did on spec here, but also for the work that doesn't succeed or result in a payout. The alternative to not paying private law enforcement is we get basically no law enforcement around labor codes if you make it not financially feasible for lawyers to take these cases.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    "I suspect the point is that if the only group which is in any way meaningfully enriched are the lawyers, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system. " Yes, and probably stop enriching anyone. But again, i could argue literally the same thing about startups or anything else HN cares about, and it makes about as much sense (since you haven't said "why" this makes sense) IE i could say: "if the only group of people meaningfully enriched are early startup employees, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system". You act as if the problem is the lawyers here. Much like crappy startups, the lawyers are just doing what clients are quite literally paying them to do. The underlying problem is the people who think this is their ticket to money. Until you solve that cultural problem, you won't get anywhere. Without people trying to sue over everything and believing they are entitled to mondo bucks because their coffee maker failed one morning or whatever, you would have no problem whatsoever. But right now we've built a system of private enforcement. That's ... what the lawyers do. and they take the cases likely to actually be good for business. If you want a different system, you'd also have to change the enforcement mechanism. "...A system lobbied for, and legislated by said lawyers." What? You realize there are lawyers lobbying on both sides of this, right? They both spend and lobby about equal amounts, too. You see the same thing in criminal law as well.
fergie 10y ago
Sure its a lot of money, but its not ridiculous. Hourly rates for top lawyers can be as high as $1250 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704071304576160362028728234 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704071304576160...), and they can bill up to 2000 hours a year. So if they have 100% utilization they can clear $2,500,000. Liss-Riordan is at the top of her game, and fighting the good fight. We should support her.
mbarq 10y ago
That's how most class-action settlements work. My dad works construction and the company he worked for were holding over-time pay from the workers in the millions. My pop got like $50. They also attached a list with the payouts for the other people on the suit and at the top of the list in the millions were the lawyers :/
Digory 10y ago
You're telling me that benefitting 33,000 people by $125 isn't worth $1.25m? If we started paying founders based on per-customer benefits, it gets ugly, fast. Amazingly, people here seem to think it's a grievance that gets paid, not the execution of the idea. In America, grievances are more common than good ideas -- everybody has them. And in many cases, no matter how good the grievance, it takes real work to get the wronging party to pay any significant amount. That's not to say the class action system can't be abused, but class actions aren't abusive by nature.

by khazhou 10y ago

M_Grey 10y ago

$125 isn't even that bad, as class actions go... it really is a wildly crooked system.

pmiller2 10y ago
I was surprised they got that much. About $3.50 and some Arby's coupons would have been more typical.

DannyBee 10y ago

Now, some amounts are egregious, but remember the lawyers are fronting literally all of the cost here. They don't get it back if they lose, either. It's kind of like complaining a vc made 500x what you did on an IPO. I also think hacker news has no concept of what a large lawsuit like this costs. if they spend 20 bucks a class member on everything from locating them to location to answering questions to handling claims, that's 50% of that 1.25 million right there. That doesn't include the actual billable hour cost of the lawsuit, which for large and complex lawsuits, is ridiculous. At the same time, hilariously, people here are against class arbitration (which would pay lawyers dramatically less and claimants more), and pretty much every other solution. It appears they just think "lawyers should be paid less, but work harder to get others money". IE they want a system where there are class actions, and the companies are made to hurt, but nobody else other than the people in the class make money. The truth is most of these claims are worthless entirely, and people don't deserve squat. So $125 is infinitely more than they should have gotten. (i'm sure someone will come along with no understanding of contract damages and claim the class members deserve billions) Are some valuable? Sure. Do some serve a valuable purpose of deterrent? Again, sure. But that's like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 of all class action lawsuits right now. Check out most class action lawfirm case lists, for example, and see how many you think are really deserving of more than nominal damages or "please fix this issue for us". Think about how many of them are the moral equivalent of bugs you've made in software before that is sold or used by other people. Do you think you should be paying millions? Personally, I can't wait for the day when liability for software bugs comes and everyone here immediately changes their mind and decides most of these kinds of lawsuits are probably not worth as much as they thought :) In the meantime, people starting worse-than-useless startups appear to be deserving of untold billions, and startups doing the same type of thing (eg making infinite multiples of their workers, who basically make squat) are a-okay. BTW, fun fact: Class action lawyers, on average, work much worse hours than startup engineers.

M_Grey 10y ago
The truth is most of these claims are worthless entirely, and people don't deserve squat. So $125 is infinitely more than they should have gotten. ...Then all the more reason the lawyers who helped them bring the suit in the first place don't deserve to be paid for empowering said fraud.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  Lawyers do what their clients pay them to do. If you want to make a dent, you need to get clients to stop believing they should earn money for this. Punishing the middlemen is unlikely to achieve much, as reprehensible as you may find them. It's like arresting drug dealers instead of trying to get people to stop taking drugs in the first place. Until you stop demand, ...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    The clients didn't pay them...
pkaye 10y ago
If you want liability protection for software bugs you just have to be willing to pay the appropriate amount to achieve it.
linuxkerneldev 10y ago
> remember the lawyers are fronting literally all of the cost here. What does that tell us about the way our legal system works?
- Shivetya 10y ago
  that it does work? how else would this work? someone claims a grievance and needs assistance to settling the dispute. by having this option of a lawyer(group/individual) front the cost it lets anyone bring a viable dispute to the table. It shakes out the frivolous from taking up the time of the courts. It also insures those suing have standing which can be difficult except when facing corporate entity. Against government a common ploy is to claim the plaintiffs don't have standing and without a private agency to go to bat for a group it can be real difficult to move forward? Government intervention? How would that work? Worse I can imagine all sorts of ways that it would be abused. Look at how much frivolous suits are in the system filed by those who don't to put any skin into the game

pat_space 10y ago

That's a little under 23% of the total judgement. What do you think a law firm should take %-wise from lawsuits like these? Should there be a cap? 5% is ~$274k, but the people impacted would still only get ~$154 at that percentage. Even if the lawyers did the case pro bono, each participant would only get ~$162. Math: (1,250,000 + 15,000) + (33,744 * 125) = 5,483,000 1,250,000 / 5,483,000 = 0.227977385 .05 * 5,483,000 = 274,150 (.95 * 5,483,000)/33,744 = 154.363739 5483000/33744 = 162.4881460407776

M_Grey 10y ago
I suspect the point is that if the only group which is in any way meaningfully enriched are the lawyers, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system. ...A system lobbied for, and legislated by said lawyers.
- x0x0 10y ago
  That's exactly the wrong take away. We've privatized law enforcement. Your complaint is said private law enforcement needs to be paid, not just for the work she did on spec here, but also for the work that doesn't succeed or result in a payout. The alternative to not paying private law enforcement is we get basically no law enforcement around labor codes if you make it not financially feasible for lawyers to take these cases.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "I suspect the point is that if the only group which is in any way meaningfully enriched are the lawyers, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system. " Yes, and probably stop enriching anyone. But again, i could argue literally the same thing about startups or anything else HN cares about, and it makes about as much sense (since you haven't said "why" this makes sense) IE i could say: "if the only group of people meaningfully enriched are early startup employees, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system". You act as if the problem is the lawyers here. Much like crappy startups, the lawyers are just doing what clients are quite literally paying them to do. The underlying problem is the people who think this is their ticket to money. Until you solve that cultural problem, you won't get anywhere. Without people trying to sue over everything and believing they are entitled to mondo bucks because their coffee maker failed one morning or whatever, you would have no problem whatsoever. But right now we've built a system of private enforcement. That's ... what the lawyers do. and they take the cases likely to actually be good for business. If you want a different system, you'd also have to change the enforcement mechanism. "...A system lobbied for, and legislated by said lawyers." What? You realize there are lawyers lobbying on both sides of this, right? They both spend and lobby about equal amounts, too. You see the same thing in criminal law as well.

fergie 10y ago

Sure its a lot of money, but its not ridiculous. Hourly rates for top lawyers can be as high as $1250 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704071304576160362028728234 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704071304576160...), and they can bill up to 2000 hours a year. So if they have 100% utilization they can clear $2,500,000. Liss-Riordan is at the top of her game, and fighting the good fight. We should support her.

mbarq 10y ago

That's how most class-action settlements work. My dad works construction and the company he worked for were holding over-time pay from the workers in the millions. My pop got like $50. They also attached a list with the payouts for the other people on the suit and at the top of the list in the millions were the lawyers :/

Digory 10y ago

You're telling me that benefitting 33,000 people by $125 isn't worth $1.25m? If we started paying founders based on per-customer benefits, it gets ugly, fast. Amazingly, people here seem to think it's a grievance that gets paid, not the execution of the idea. In America, grievances are more common than good ideas -- everybody has them. And in many cases, no matter how good the grievance, it takes real work to get the wronging party to pay any significant amount. That's not to say the class action system can't be abused, but class actions aren't abusive by nature.