7 ms·

> The case has also highlighted the issue of migrant workers' access to justice. Ms Parti was able to stay in Singapore and fight her case due to the support of

by whack 6y ago

> The case has also highlighted the issue of migrant workers' access to justice. Ms Parti was able to stay in Singapore and fight her case due to the support of the non-governmental organisation Home, and lawyer Anil Balchandani, who acted pro bono but estimated his legal fees would have otherwise come up to S$150,000. It's worth noting that she was only able to get justice, because of the volunteer work put in by a very good lawyer - someone whose fees she could have never afforded. This doesn't seem unique to Singapore - I've heard of this problem existing in every country. The legal system only works if you have the money to bankroll your case. Even a multimillionaire like Hulk Hogan couldn't have prevailed against Gawker without a billionaire backing him. It boggles my mind that such a pay-to-play system is still considered to be acceptable.

jdashg 6y ago
One tantalizing improvement would be if legal fees were pooled and split evenly between sides, so long as the initial case had reasonable standing.
- GuardianCaveman 6y ago
  This seems like it would be the same outcome. One rich and one poor and split it evenly and it will always end badly for the poor person even if they win.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    I think the idea is that the required contribution is means tested with assistance where appropriate, and that both mandatory and optional excess contributions must be shared.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    There are variants of this that could work much better than the current system used in most western nations. Today, if I can spend $1K on legal fees and want to sue someone with a $1M budget, I'll just lose. To compete with that, I'd have to pony up $1M up front and hope I win to recoup my costs afterwards. The alternative model is this: Step 1) A lawsuit is filed Step 2) Each party puts double the money they are willing to spend into the "pot". So if you have a $1M budget, you have to put $2M in. The counter-party willing to spend only $1K puts $2K in. Step 3) The court takes the available funds from the pot evenly to the two participants, giving each one the same amount as the larger "willing to pay" amount specified. So in this example: The poor guy seeking justice spends gets a refund of $1K (spending a net of $1K) and his lawyers receive $1M from the pot. The rich arsehole also gets $1K back and his lawyers get $1M from the pot. I'm not saying this is a perfect system, but it would allow poor people to sue rich people and not be at a massive disadvantage. Which is why nothing like this has any chance of happening.
    - ABCLAW 6y ago
      No, it would let rich people just create confusing business documentation then bid 0 dollars and choke out every case at the discovery stage. No thanks.
    - ars 6y ago
      Why would you bid any amount at all? I don't understand why the rich person would be incentivized to bid. Let both bid zero and skip the lawyers. And wouldn't this be a great way for lawyers to earn lots of fees by encouraging poor people to sue rich people. Much simpler is simply get rid of personal lawyers. The adversarial model is not the only option. You can do like small claims court and have the judge act as a truth finder. The court could hire a lawyer if the judge feels that assistance is needed (for complex cases).
      - jdashg 6y ago
        Today, the poor side must bear (or float) the cost of their lawyer, but the rich side has unbounded ability to fight it. Under a pooled system, you could ante in 10k and if the opposition needs more money to defend themselves than 5k, they have to give you monetary ammunition as well! This prevents being nuked into settlement by being outspent, despite an otherwise sound claim. (Which definitely happens right now)
    - viking1066 6y ago
      This is how the divorce lawsuit in America works. Typically a husband must pay a high powered lawyer for his wife, if his salary is higher.
- forgotmysn 6y ago
  wouldnt corps just hire armies of lawyers and then demand that the other party cover half the cost?
  - lend000 6y ago
    My interpretation is that for every dollar each side spends on legal fees related to a case, they provide some amount (let's say $0.50) to an escrow account that will be given to the opposition (separate from any awards in the ruling) if they win the case to refund their expenses, or returned to the spender if not. Some potential difficulties could arise in separating legal fees related to a case from general legal work being done by lawyers on retainer. Furthermore, this would still require both sides to front the money for the case, although if a lawyer thought they had a strong case, they could take the case on incentive for a poor client.
  - thatguy0900 6y ago
    I believe what hes saying is this: Bigcorp wants to spend 200k on lawyers, i want to spend 5000. so we combine them to be 205k, and we each get 102500$ to spend on lawyers. It would be an interesting situation though since the person spending less isn't really incentivized to spend anything at all and instead leach of the other.
    - sosborn 6y ago
      At that point though, bigcorp might look at the case say “F-it, let’s move on with our lives.”
mattigames 6y ago
Is there any country that does it right? Meaning one where all lawyers are public servants (e.g. get a fixed monthly salary from the government) or something similar?
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I'd like a lawyer who pays attention to my case, not one who draws a check no matter what he does.
  - danielheath 6y ago
    Statistically speaking, you can't afford to pay one, so - too bad.
- myself248 6y ago
  I've been wondering about that. If there's no such thing as a private lawyer, all defenders are public defenders... would that work? The law should be equally accessible to all, and making the law ever more complicated only exacerbates the problem with no potential of getting better.
- caymanjim 6y ago
  That wouldn't really help. Even if only publicly-funded lawyers could represent criminal defendants (which I don't think anyone actually wants), those with financial means would be able to employ an army of experts, researchers, investigators, etc. to aid in their case, in addition to the biases juries have toward those with means, and political sway the elite hold. And if you somehow prevented that inequality, you'd just drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator, and all the more people would be harmed by unjust prosecution. Every criminal defendant (at least for felonies or serious misdemeanors) in the US has access to a government-funded lawyer, if they can't afford their own. There are over 15,000 public defenders in the US, who get a fixed salary as you mention. They are often overworked, and have limited time and resources to help the people they defend, but they help countless people every day. I'd like to improve the funding and the number of public defenders available (and of course decrease the number of people on trial for nonsense). I'm glad the system exists. It's helped friends and family, with largely positive outcomes that I don't think would have been any better with an expensive private lawyer. When it comes to more serious crimes, you probably don't want to be in that situation.
op03 6y ago
It's not mind boggling if you look at budget allocations for Justice delivery anywhere in the world. It doesn't generate revenue and takes up huge costs in salaries/pensions/healthcare etc. Cities and States have finite resources and and therefore come up with formulas of how many courts, judges, cops per 100K they can afford. Where I live there is like 1 Judge for 300K ppl. And most places its worse. So irrespective of how sophisticated and nuanced the law gets that becomes a bottleneck. Something for the imaginative HN crowd to attack.
- yowlingcat 6y ago
  Yup. There are myriad logistics issues at play here. The tricky part is regulatory and legislative side of it. That's where the politics come in.
- salawat 6y ago
  This seems a non sequitur to me in that it is not the cost of the time in court that is the barrier. I'm aware of no court costs that are ruinous by any stretch of the imagination. (E.g., filing fees, documentation access costs). The de-facto necessities to succeed however, e.g., access to well-organized and consumable cross-referenced case law, the requisite knowledge of courtroom procedure, knowing what to file, by when, and what things mean without significant training or oversight of a retained lawyer; and that's where your issue comes in. You could make the argument that an infinite number of courts and judges would bring the cost down; but I'm not convinced it would. As you'd still have the exponential case law parsing cost outpacing your availability of lawyers. There comes a point where stare decisis and it's potential infinitive of cases depending on the craftyness of your lawyer at painting a distinction without a difference, and judges willing to buy it, where the costs seem pretty much guaranteed to spiral out of control.
  - manquer 6y ago
    Lack of resourcing is absolutely costing us particularly IT. The lack of free access to proceedings data, the manual filling and processing without ease of access . The lack of access to lawyers and judges alike make them expensive. This is by design in all professions which requires memberships in addition to a degree like lawyers and accountants as compared to engineers. If banks still did banking on ledger books only the rich will be banked as it was until recent times. To scale your ability to serve is closly related to cost of service. It is applicable whether it is SaaS or rocket science or legal system
vernie 6y ago
Which billionaire?
- emiliobumachar 6y ago
  Peter Thiel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker
  - NotSammyHagar 6y ago
    Thiel had a kind of entrepreneurial attack against Gawker. He bankrolled several lawsuits, hoping that one would stick. He basically had infinite money to try for a win. Eventually this one stuck. I do think Hogan could have afforded his suit, but probably wouldn't have bothered. The lawsuit lead to the typical Streisand effect, no one would have heard about this until it went big, so many people like me wouldn't have heard about a famous person's sex tape with disreputable characters involved without an endless lawsuit. Gawker was a fault for showing someone's sex tape, which had apparently leaked and was quite likely shown against the people in it's wishes. Separately from the terribleness of that event, extremely rich people can afford endless lawsuits until something hits, they can overwhelm regular people, which is also a bad thing.
    - unishark 6y ago
      I think the key component for this kind of tactic to work is have your target be Gawker. The New York Times has made bigger and more powerful enemies than Peter Thiel, as have many other less-universally-hated media companies.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
hexbinencoded 6y ago
Economic apartheid. Justice isn't blind, some people only pretend it's a meritocracy. Just ask Chris Hedges about the students he teaches in prison who are mostly black and poor who will die there because they couldn't afford decent lawyers. The US, for example, has the highest incarceration rate in the world of every country except Seychelles and has for-profit prisons, immigration detention centers, and legal slavery of convicts working for corporations and as firefighters for slave wages.
NicoJuicy 6y ago
> I've heard of this problem existing in every country. The legal system only works if you have the money to bankroll your case. To be honest, I don't think it's the case where I live ( Belgium - Europe). > The most common pro bono cases are asylum cases, family law cases (such as divorce, alimentation or visitation rights cases) and criminal law cases. A special branch of the criminal law cases is the so-called Salduz permanency. https://www.crowell.com/Locations/Brussels/Pro-Bono-System-in-Belgium https://www.crowell.com/Locations/Brussels/Pro-Bono-System-i...
gwd 6y ago
> It's worth noting that she was only able to get justice I'm not sure why people keep saying she got justice. It's not justice until she's compensated for the lost salary / effort of defending herself, and the person who wrongly accused her is punished, along with the corrupt people who helped him.

by whack 6y ago

jdashg 6y ago

One tantalizing improvement would be if legal fees were pooled and split evenly between sides, so long as the initial case had reasonable standing.

GuardianCaveman 6y ago
This seems like it would be the same outcome. One rich and one poor and split it evenly and it will always end badly for the poor person even if they win.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  I think the idea is that the required contribution is means tested with assistance where appropriate, and that both mandatory and optional excess contributions must be shared.
- jiggawatts 6y ago
  There are variants of this that could work much better than the current system used in most western nations. Today, if I can spend $1K on legal fees and want to sue someone with a $1M budget, I'll just lose. To compete with that, I'd have to pony up $1M up front and hope I win to recoup my costs afterwards. The alternative model is this: Step 1) A lawsuit is filed Step 2) Each party puts double the money they are willing to spend into the "pot". So if you have a $1M budget, you have to put $2M in. The counter-party willing to spend only $1K puts $2K in. Step 3) The court takes the available funds from the pot evenly to the two participants, giving each one the same amount as the larger "willing to pay" amount specified. So in this example: The poor guy seeking justice spends gets a refund of $1K (spending a net of $1K) and his lawyers receive $1M from the pot. The rich arsehole also gets $1K back and his lawyers get $1M from the pot. I'm not saying this is a perfect system, but it would allow poor people to sue rich people and not be at a massive disadvantage. Which is why nothing like this has any chance of happening.
  - ABCLAW 6y ago
    No, it would let rich people just create confusing business documentation then bid 0 dollars and choke out every case at the discovery stage. No thanks.
  - ars 6y ago
    Why would you bid any amount at all? I don't understand why the rich person would be incentivized to bid. Let both bid zero and skip the lawyers. And wouldn't this be a great way for lawyers to earn lots of fees by encouraging poor people to sue rich people. Much simpler is simply get rid of personal lawyers. The adversarial model is not the only option. You can do like small claims court and have the judge act as a truth finder. The court could hire a lawyer if the judge feels that assistance is needed (for complex cases).
    - jdashg 6y ago
      Today, the poor side must bear (or float) the cost of their lawyer, but the rich side has unbounded ability to fight it. Under a pooled system, you could ante in 10k and if the opposition needs more money to defend themselves than 5k, they have to give you monetary ammunition as well! This prevents being nuked into settlement by being outspent, despite an otherwise sound claim. (Which definitely happens right now)
  - viking1066 6y ago
    This is how the divorce lawsuit in America works. Typically a husband must pay a high powered lawyer for his wife, if his salary is higher.
forgotmysn 6y ago
wouldnt corps just hire armies of lawyers and then demand that the other party cover half the cost?
- lend000 6y ago
  My interpretation is that for every dollar each side spends on legal fees related to a case, they provide some amount (let's say $0.50) to an escrow account that will be given to the opposition (separate from any awards in the ruling) if they win the case to refund their expenses, or returned to the spender if not. Some potential difficulties could arise in separating legal fees related to a case from general legal work being done by lawyers on retainer. Furthermore, this would still require both sides to front the money for the case, although if a lawyer thought they had a strong case, they could take the case on incentive for a poor client.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  I believe what hes saying is this: Bigcorp wants to spend 200k on lawyers, i want to spend 5000. so we combine them to be 205k, and we each get 102500$ to spend on lawyers. It would be an interesting situation though since the person spending less isn't really incentivized to spend anything at all and instead leach of the other.
  - sosborn 6y ago
    At that point though, bigcorp might look at the case say “F-it, let’s move on with our lives.”

mattigames 6y ago

Is there any country that does it right? Meaning one where all lawyers are public servants (e.g. get a fixed monthly salary from the government) or something similar?

WalterBright 6y ago
I'd like a lawyer who pays attention to my case, not one who draws a check no matter what he does.
- danielheath 6y ago
  Statistically speaking, you can't afford to pay one, so - too bad.
myself248 6y ago
I've been wondering about that. If there's no such thing as a private lawyer, all defenders are public defenders... would that work? The law should be equally accessible to all, and making the law ever more complicated only exacerbates the problem with no potential of getting better.
caymanjim 6y ago
That wouldn't really help. Even if only publicly-funded lawyers could represent criminal defendants (which I don't think anyone actually wants), those with financial means would be able to employ an army of experts, researchers, investigators, etc. to aid in their case, in addition to the biases juries have toward those with means, and political sway the elite hold. And if you somehow prevented that inequality, you'd just drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator, and all the more people would be harmed by unjust prosecution. Every criminal defendant (at least for felonies or serious misdemeanors) in the US has access to a government-funded lawyer, if they can't afford their own. There are over 15,000 public defenders in the US, who get a fixed salary as you mention. They are often overworked, and have limited time and resources to help the people they defend, but they help countless people every day. I'd like to improve the funding and the number of public defenders available (and of course decrease the number of people on trial for nonsense). I'm glad the system exists. It's helped friends and family, with largely positive outcomes that I don't think would have been any better with an expensive private lawyer. When it comes to more serious crimes, you probably don't want to be in that situation.

op03 6y ago

It's not mind boggling if you look at budget allocations for Justice delivery anywhere in the world. It doesn't generate revenue and takes up huge costs in salaries/pensions/healthcare etc. Cities and States have finite resources and and therefore come up with formulas of how many courts, judges, cops per 100K they can afford. Where I live there is like 1 Judge for 300K ppl. And most places its worse. So irrespective of how sophisticated and nuanced the law gets that becomes a bottleneck. Something for the imaginative HN crowd to attack.

yowlingcat 6y ago
Yup. There are myriad logistics issues at play here. The tricky part is regulatory and legislative side of it. That's where the politics come in.
salawat 6y ago
This seems a non sequitur to me in that it is not the cost of the time in court that is the barrier. I'm aware of no court costs that are ruinous by any stretch of the imagination. (E.g., filing fees, documentation access costs). The de-facto necessities to succeed however, e.g., access to well-organized and consumable cross-referenced case law, the requisite knowledge of courtroom procedure, knowing what to file, by when, and what things mean without significant training or oversight of a retained lawyer; and that's where your issue comes in. You could make the argument that an infinite number of courts and judges would bring the cost down; but I'm not convinced it would. As you'd still have the exponential case law parsing cost outpacing your availability of lawyers. There comes a point where stare decisis and it's potential infinitive of cases depending on the craftyness of your lawyer at painting a distinction without a difference, and judges willing to buy it, where the costs seem pretty much guaranteed to spiral out of control.
- manquer 6y ago
  Lack of resourcing is absolutely costing us particularly IT. The lack of free access to proceedings data, the manual filling and processing without ease of access . The lack of access to lawyers and judges alike make them expensive. This is by design in all professions which requires memberships in addition to a degree like lawyers and accountants as compared to engineers. If banks still did banking on ledger books only the rich will be banked as it was until recent times. To scale your ability to serve is closly related to cost of service. It is applicable whether it is SaaS or rocket science or legal system

vernie 6y ago

Which billionaire?

emiliobumachar 6y ago
Peter Thiel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollea_v._Gawker
- NotSammyHagar 6y ago
  Thiel had a kind of entrepreneurial attack against Gawker. He bankrolled several lawsuits, hoping that one would stick. He basically had infinite money to try for a win. Eventually this one stuck. I do think Hogan could have afforded his suit, but probably wouldn't have bothered. The lawsuit lead to the typical Streisand effect, no one would have heard about this until it went big, so many people like me wouldn't have heard about a famous person's sex tape with disreputable characters involved without an endless lawsuit. Gawker was a fault for showing someone's sex tape, which had apparently leaked and was quite likely shown against the people in it's wishes. Separately from the terribleness of that event, extremely rich people can afford endless lawsuits until something hits, they can overwhelm regular people, which is also a bad thing.
  - unishark 6y ago
    I think the key component for this kind of tactic to work is have your target be Gawker. The New York Times has made bigger and more powerful enemies than Peter Thiel, as have many other less-universally-hated media companies.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

hexbinencoded 6y ago

Economic apartheid. Justice isn't blind, some people only pretend it's a meritocracy. Just ask Chris Hedges about the students he teaches in prison who are mostly black and poor who will die there because they couldn't afford decent lawyers. The US, for example, has the highest incarceration rate in the world of every country except Seychelles and has for-profit prisons, immigration detention centers, and legal slavery of convicts working for corporations and as firefighters for slave wages.

NicoJuicy 6y ago

> I've heard of this problem existing in every country. The legal system only works if you have the money to bankroll your case. To be honest, I don't think it's the case where I live ( Belgium - Europe). > The most common pro bono cases are asylum cases, family law cases (such as divorce, alimentation or visitation rights cases) and criminal law cases. A special branch of the criminal law cases is the so-called Salduz permanency. https://www.crowell.com/Locations/Brussels/Pro-Bono-System-in-Belgium https://www.crowell.com/Locations/Brussels/Pro-Bono-System-i...

gwd 6y ago

> It's worth noting that she was only able to get justice I'm not sure why people keep saying she got justice. It's not justice until she's compensated for the lost salary / effort of defending herself, and the person who wrongly accused her is punished, along with the corrupt people who helped him.