Actually, the individuals had initiated the suit, having been (in their view) taken advantage of by the lender. When they lost the case, they got nothing on the

Actually, the individuals had initiated the suit, having been (in their view) taken advantage of by the lender. When they lost the case, they got nothing on their claims for damages and then got stuck with the tab for the lender's attorneys' fees on top of that. In this sense, assuming that they were actually right on their grievance with the lender and that the case was incorrectly decided, they got what might be called "doubly screwed." I don't think you can have a rule that potentially awards fees to one side but not the other without creating the potential for great unfairness. This item is of course anecdotal, as noted by others, but it is typical of cases I have been involved with in a career in which (apart from my transactional work with startups) many of the litigation cases I undertook involved commercial matters where the "little guy" had been, in effect, stabbed and left for dead by others, often a larger company. These cases are incredibly difficult to prosecute, in part because the client is often left with few resources with which to fight (for example, in one such case, which went for three years before reaching trial, a founder had his company stolen by disloyal board members who granted themselves, in serial votes aimed at avoiding any formal "conflicts," large amounts of stock so as to gain control of the company, who then proceeded to terminate the founder's employment, and who then used the company's cash flow to fight his attempts to challenge the things they had personally done wrong - I took that one on hourly but wound up $400K into it before we won at trial and got the client restored). In these sorts of cases, the fight is tough enough and, if a client of this type also faces the prospect of paying the other side's fees on losing, the burden can become crushing. All that said, I will grant that this is a difficult issue and, unlike many members of my profession, I do believe that major components of the litigation world are abusive and desperately in need of reform. My reason for highlighting a couple of examples showing the real-world impact of the loser-pay rule is not to say that it might not be a good reform but to underscore that a blanket shift away from the current rule might have unintended consequences that need to be considered carefully. After all, the ultimate goal of a court system is justice and not any ideological aim of helping anyone arbitrarily at the cost of fairness, whether it be big companies or the "little guy," institutional defendants or consumers, or any other class of claimant or defendant.