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Is this an opportunity for a new type of law firm that opens up to deal with one type of complaint for one company and offers extremely low fees to file? The id

Is this an opportunity for a new type of law firm that opens up to deal with one type of complaint for one company and offers extremely low fees to file? The idea would be that the paperwork is all the same for the X thousand/million people suing INDIVIDUALLY such that economies of scale take over and the cost of actually filing and pushing the suit through becomes cheap enough for almost anyone. On the side of Giant Bank, they suddenly have 150,000 lawsuits filed against them and have to act in some way. Is that even allowed? Would a court just tell the law firm to go away and stop spamming it?

lightbyte 9y ago
>On the side of Giant Bank, they suddenly have 150,000 lawsuits filed against them and have to act in some way. Is that even allowed? Would a court just tell the law firm to go away and stop spamming it? This sounds fairly similar to how the Church of Scientology blackmailed the US government into giving it tax exempt status. They filed millions of lawsuits against every IRS employee and drowned them in it until they gave in. It worked out extremely well for them, so it may work out the same in your example.
comex 9y ago
With (most) arbitration clauses, you can't actually sue at all. You have to go through a private arbitration firm, which can set pretty much whatever rules they want - including things like basing rulings on religious law [1]. Compared to that, I'm pretty sure there'd be nothing illegal about rules to defeat the hypothetical law firm, like requiring complainants to show up in person. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-religious-arbitration-scripture-is-the-rule-of-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-reli...
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  Except they have to get all of those millions of lawsuits dismissed individually by advancing that argument and failing in even a single of those cases through a novel argument on the part of plaintiff, sympathetic judge, etc could open an avalanche of lawsuits against the firms. It also would force the courts dismissing the lawsuits to grapple with the sheer scale of criminality that the dismissals are being used to hide -- it's easy to hide it when you shut down a handful of lawsuits and the vast majority of your victims remain silent, but are judges going to be so accepting of mandatory arbitration when they've already, personally, dismissed thousands of suits because of arbitration clauses that are about the exact same kind of fraud perpetrated by the exact same people and have thousands more left on their docket? How many times do you believe that a judge can see the exact same crime happen from the same perpetrator and just go "Ho, hum, nothing to see here!" Sometimes, the key is just to be really noisy and annoying so they can't ignore the issue. The act of filing the suits, particularly in a concerted bulk effort, and forcing the government to address and dismiss each individual suit is an effective form of speech and protest. Your argument is shallow excuses for defeatism, which in turn excuses not actually trying. Edit: It also introduces a novel argument of "Uh, so this court has dismissed over 10,000 lawsuits about this exact issue -- clearly we're being abused by a corporation and petitioning the state for assistance. [Argument why the state is obligated to assist.]" It forces the court to explicitly address the argument that the arbitration system is being coupled with a power imbalance to enable criminal action against entire states of people by documenting the scale via dismissals -- which are public record and can be used as evidence in subsequent cases.
  - Chaebixi 9y ago
    > Except they have to get all of those millions of lawsuits dismissed individually by advancing that argument and failing in even a single of those cases through a novel argument on the part of plaintiff, sympathetic judge, etc could open an avalanche of lawsuits against the firms. That could only work if people actually filed the lawsuit. However, filing a lawsuit isn't free (as the below random website attests [1]). If it's a near certainty that the lawsuit will be dismissed, few people are going to want to pay $320 (plus any other costs) to file it. I'd like to hope people have the principle to bang their heads against the courts until they take (the proper) action, but I'm pessimistic. Honestly, maybe novel political solutions are the answer? Could a state pass a heavy tax on binding arbitration, to be paid by the party that required it? [1] https://calaborlaw.com/how-much-do-lawsuits-cost/ https://calaborlaw.com/how-much-do-lawsuits-cost/
  - comex 9y ago
    I mean, the judge is going to respond by sanctioning the attorney(s) for frivolous litigation. If your legal argument (for why the case shouldn't go to arbitration) has been rejected in court, initiating even one more case before the same court with the exact same argument could justifiably be considered a waste of the court's time. Initiate several of them and you're going to be fined; 10,000 and you're probably looking at things like contempt-of-court charges and disbarment. That's aside from the fee to initiate each case, as Chaebixi mentioned. That said, if you're willing to risk all that to make a political statement - i.e. to pressure legislatures to change the law around arbitration - I can't rule out that it could be effective. But I suspect that other avenues for making a statement would be cheaper and more effective (and avoid the stigma of abusing the court system). For example, how about just taking out TV ads? Find some maximally sympathetic victims of the arbitration system, and have them tell their stories. Less dramatic, but right now I think there isn't all that much public awareness of the issue - the New York Times' series notwithstanding. Arbitration is such a classic "big corp screwing over the little guy" story that I think a large number of even Republican-leaning voters would oppose it, especially the Trump camp (ew, but still), if they heard the full story. But most of them have probably never heard of it, or have only heard one-sided accounts that emphasize how class-action suits cost businesses and don't usually win plaintiffs all that much money. (Both of which are true, but ignore the fact that class actions are effective at holding defendants accountable for violating the law, and getting them to change their behavior - whereas a trickle of arbitration cases can just be dismissed as a cost of business.)
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  > [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-religious-arbitration-scripture-is-the-rule-of-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-reli... This is literally the Christian version of "Sharia Law", which seems to be a boogeyman of the conservative right. Unbelievable.
howard941 9y ago
No. Yes. No. But it's not viable. Same-county Giant Bank will still cost anywhere from $55 to $300 to file a small claims action if in my state (FL). Add $40 to pay the sheriff to serve the statement of claim. Who's going to foot the initial $1.8M to file the 150K claims and how's the new type of law firm going to get paid? If you want to have a small government without an effective consumer protection agency then you'll need to ditch mandatory arbitration and permit the class actions to flow.
xphilter 9y ago
There's no precedent or issue-preclusion with arbitration. So any win you get in one case will have to be re-fought 150,000 times. Hardly a time effective plan.
emodendroket 9y ago
I don't see how that works when the plaintiff and the plaintiff's attorney still have to show up and make arguments.
- chillydawg 9y ago
  Yeah, eventually. And probably only a few of them. All the people filing pool resources and bankroll 100 people to actually show up with the same attourney in front of the same 2 or 3 judges.

lightbyte 9y ago

>On the side of Giant Bank, they suddenly have 150,000 lawsuits filed against them and have to act in some way. Is that even allowed? Would a court just tell the law firm to go away and stop spamming it? This sounds fairly similar to how the Church of Scientology blackmailed the US government into giving it tax exempt status. They filed millions of lawsuits against every IRS employee and drowned them in it until they gave in. It worked out extremely well for them, so it may work out the same in your example.

comex 9y ago

With (most) arbitration clauses, you can't actually sue at all. You have to go through a private arbitration firm, which can set pretty much whatever rules they want - including things like basing rulings on religious law [1]. Compared to that, I'm pretty sure there'd be nothing illegal about rules to defeat the hypothetical law firm, like requiring complainants to show up in person. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-religious-arbitration-scripture-is-the-rule-of-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-reli...

SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
Except they have to get all of those millions of lawsuits dismissed individually by advancing that argument and failing in even a single of those cases through a novel argument on the part of plaintiff, sympathetic judge, etc could open an avalanche of lawsuits against the firms. It also would force the courts dismissing the lawsuits to grapple with the sheer scale of criminality that the dismissals are being used to hide -- it's easy to hide it when you shut down a handful of lawsuits and the vast majority of your victims remain silent, but are judges going to be so accepting of mandatory arbitration when they've already, personally, dismissed thousands of suits because of arbitration clauses that are about the exact same kind of fraud perpetrated by the exact same people and have thousands more left on their docket? How many times do you believe that a judge can see the exact same crime happen from the same perpetrator and just go "Ho, hum, nothing to see here!" Sometimes, the key is just to be really noisy and annoying so they can't ignore the issue. The act of filing the suits, particularly in a concerted bulk effort, and forcing the government to address and dismiss each individual suit is an effective form of speech and protest. Your argument is shallow excuses for defeatism, which in turn excuses not actually trying. Edit: It also introduces a novel argument of "Uh, so this court has dismissed over 10,000 lawsuits about this exact issue -- clearly we're being abused by a corporation and petitioning the state for assistance. [Argument why the state is obligated to assist.]" It forces the court to explicitly address the argument that the arbitration system is being coupled with a power imbalance to enable criminal action against entire states of people by documenting the scale via dismissals -- which are public record and can be used as evidence in subsequent cases.
- Chaebixi 9y ago
  > Except they have to get all of those millions of lawsuits dismissed individually by advancing that argument and failing in even a single of those cases through a novel argument on the part of plaintiff, sympathetic judge, etc could open an avalanche of lawsuits against the firms. That could only work if people actually filed the lawsuit. However, filing a lawsuit isn't free (as the below random website attests [1]). If it's a near certainty that the lawsuit will be dismissed, few people are going to want to pay $320 (plus any other costs) to file it. I'd like to hope people have the principle to bang their heads against the courts until they take (the proper) action, but I'm pessimistic. Honestly, maybe novel political solutions are the answer? Could a state pass a heavy tax on binding arbitration, to be paid by the party that required it? [1] https://calaborlaw.com/how-much-do-lawsuits-cost/ https://calaborlaw.com/how-much-do-lawsuits-cost/
- comex 9y ago
  I mean, the judge is going to respond by sanctioning the attorney(s) for frivolous litigation. If your legal argument (for why the case shouldn't go to arbitration) has been rejected in court, initiating even one more case before the same court with the exact same argument could justifiably be considered a waste of the court's time. Initiate several of them and you're going to be fined; 10,000 and you're probably looking at things like contempt-of-court charges and disbarment. That's aside from the fee to initiate each case, as Chaebixi mentioned. That said, if you're willing to risk all that to make a political statement - i.e. to pressure legislatures to change the law around arbitration - I can't rule out that it could be effective. But I suspect that other avenues for making a statement would be cheaper and more effective (and avoid the stigma of abusing the court system). For example, how about just taking out TV ads? Find some maximally sympathetic victims of the arbitration system, and have them tell their stories. Less dramatic, but right now I think there isn't all that much public awareness of the issue - the New York Times' series notwithstanding. Arbitration is such a classic "big corp screwing over the little guy" story that I think a large number of even Republican-leaning voters would oppose it, especially the Trump camp (ew, but still), if they heard the full story. But most of them have probably never heard of it, or have only heard one-sided accounts that emphasize how class-action suits cost businesses and don't usually win plaintiffs all that much money. (Both of which are true, but ignore the fact that class actions are effective at holding defendants accountable for violating the law, and getting them to change their behavior - whereas a trickle of arbitration cases can just be dismissed as a cost of business.)
AlexandrB 9y ago
> [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-religious-arbitration-scripture-is-the-rule-of-law.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/business/dealbook/in-reli... This is literally the Christian version of "Sharia Law", which seems to be a boogeyman of the conservative right. Unbelievable.

howard941 9y ago

No. Yes. No. But it's not viable. Same-county Giant Bank will still cost anywhere from $55 to $300 to file a small claims action if in my state (FL). Add $40 to pay the sheriff to serve the statement of claim. Who's going to foot the initial $1.8M to file the 150K claims and how's the new type of law firm going to get paid? If you want to have a small government without an effective consumer protection agency then you'll need to ditch mandatory arbitration and permit the class actions to flow.

xphilter 9y ago

There's no precedent or issue-preclusion with arbitration. So any win you get in one case will have to be re-fought 150,000 times. Hardly a time effective plan.

emodendroket 9y ago

I don't see how that works when the plaintiff and the plaintiff's attorney still have to show up and make arguments.

chillydawg 9y ago
Yeah, eventually. And probably only a few of them. All the people filing pool resources and bankroll 100 people to actually show up with the same attourney in front of the same 2 or 3 judges.