6 ms·

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 sal

by 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
  - salawat 6y ago
    Yes... but also no. Again, the problem comes in in the fundamentals of velocity of information propagation, of which only half is open to unrestricted scalability. Namely, documents can be propagated at the speed of light. Understanding cannot. You can put every document exactly where I need it as soon as it is accessible, but unless I've had enough immersion in the jargon and specific ways of life of the profession, I'm going to need time to absorb and reckon what to do with it, and where to go next. Even if I do know what to look for, good luck hitting up any database of well cross-referenced case law without paying an exorbitant fee due to the nature of the returns of the profession, and the essentially captive audience to it. Most of those data sources areas fundamental to law as Machinery's Handbook to Machining, yet its locked up behind more imposing barriers to entry than Fort Knox; fiscal, temporal, and cultural. Short of a periodic collapse and simplification of case law such that the entire field can become more accessible so something less than a Guild/Cartel of highly exclusive barristers, I'm not seeing a fundamental opportunity to change things for the better.
    - salawat 6y ago
      To flesh out my thoughts, there are publicly accessible law libraries you can go to for working through the up to date case law by checking the registers and what not, but from my understanding this is a far slower process than using the tools most practicing attorneys pay rather large recurring access fees to. If there is a lawyer about, feel free to correct me, but I believe Westlaw is one, LexisNexis is another I think? It's been a while since I was deep in this vertical of research. What I do remember is that the difference in efficiency between someone who does have access to one of those systems vs. Someone who doesn't is essentially the difference between someone armed with Google Case Law Edition vs. someone working out of a card catalog. You can get an order of magnitude higher discoverability leading to potential alternate avenues for legal construction with one over the other. You can also get an idea of what approach any defense or counterpart might make by researching what your opponent would want since you're both working out of the same b o st of case law. If you're just looking to do one case and be done, the law library may work. If you're in court with any regularity, the rest of the profession has made your decision for you, and it's time to pony up for access to the big boy's toolset.
ashtonkem 6y ago
Is the court itself the limiting cost for litigation, or is it the lawyers representing the parties?
- AniseAbyss 6y ago
  Well if you are facing the government your adversary has practically limitless time and money... I'm glad I live in a country were lawyers still have some professional honor to take on cases that don't pay. But they have to subsidize poor clients with rich ones.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Right, but that's only really a problem because affording a lawyer for any amount of time is ruinously expensive. If lawyers were cheaper (or litigation much faster), even fighting the government would be affordable, even if it would be an awful experience in other, non-financial ways. Pro-bono stuff is a great and honorable tradition, but it's not enough. I worry about any system that depends on poor citizens being sympathetic enough to receive free legal representation as a charity from otherwise unaffordably expensive lawyers. It's clearly superior to locking all poor citizens away from legal representation, but it's not anywhere close to sufficient.
mattigames 6y ago
That doesn't make sense to me, such system would obviously get a percentage from each settlement/fine (e.g. 10%) to pay for the costs of running such system, the big cases would be the ones keeping the system afloat.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
I'm personally not looking forward to Judger - Uber, but for Justice.
- kbenson 6y ago
  While I get the joke, I think this is basically binding arbitration, which is a thing. It has its own set of upsides and downsides.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  You'll enjoy _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ then, in the way someone else might enjoy a slasher flick.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    as it happens that is one of the Heinlein books I consider worthwhile.
- Threeve303 6y ago
  Something tells me that out of the three new apps, Judger, Rural Juror, and Executioner, the executioner app will be the most popular.
distances 6y ago
> Where I live there is like 1 Judge for 300K ppl. And most places its worse. Out of interest, here's a map of judges per capita. It seems the situation in the US is especially bleak among western countries. https://en.actualitix.com/doc/maps/wld/world-map-professional-judges-by-country.jpg https://en.actualitix.com/doc/maps/wld/world-map-professiona...
- tedsanders 6y ago
  From my brief googling, this seems misleading. We have only ~1,700 Federal judges in the USA, but our parallel state system has ~30,000 judges, which are uncounted by your linked graph. https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publications/judge_faq.pdf https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publicati...
  - distances 6y ago
    Well that explains! I was wondering what's going on there.
aww_dang 6y ago
From my perspective, I find it hard to approach without addressing the monopoly role the state plays in dispensing justice. Maybe others can add their thoughts about how to reform the current system towards these ends. That said, a privatized law system could potentially provide greater competition and lower costs overall. "Customary Law With Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description Of a Modern System of Law and Order Without State Coercion" https://cdn.mises.org/9_2_2_0.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/9_2_2_0.pdf
- finolex1 6y ago
  Isn't commercial arbitration basically a privatized law system?
  - aww_dang 6y ago
    Yes, for example both the employer and maid could sign a contract for arbitration. Insurance schemes and protections for both parties could be part of this. How it would work in practice would depend upon the specifics of the contracts and the quality of the arbitration. There's potential for both positive and negative outcomes. Ideally competition would create an equilibrium which benefits both parties. There's a very pessimistic, knee-jerk interpretation I'd like to address. Outcomes are in no way guaranteed to go one way or the other in this hypothetical. Better protections for workers would allow a larger pool of potential hires. This in turn could create a cost incentive for robust worker protection and liability. Insurers may guarantee the employer or employee by screening for potential misconduct. This is not to say that it would be a perfect system, but that there is a potential for incentives to work in both directions. With enough scrutiny by brighter minds than my own a workable framework might emerge.
    - ValentineC 6y ago
      Singapore has a government-run mediation centre for employment-related claims [1], and unresolved cases can advance to an employment tribunal [2] (where no lawyers are allowed) after. The difference in this case were the criminal charges. Like in most jurisdictions in the world, it would be pretty foolish of someone to represent themselves without being trained in criminal law and court procedure — especially when a failed attempt doesn't mean bankruptcy, but incarceration. [1] https://www.tal.sg/tadm https://www.tal.sg/tadm [2] https://www.statecourts.gov.sg/cws/ECT/Pages/An-Overview-of-the-Employment-Claims-Tribunals-(ECT).aspx https://www.statecourts.gov.sg/cws/ECT/Pages/An-Overview-of-...
michaelt 6y ago
In the German system, civil litigation is a lot faster and less expensive, despite having the same level of public satisfaction as much more expensive countries [1] I'm no expert on their system, but there's some regulation of lawyers' fees ('RVG') and also a different system of law - among other things, they do not recognise the concept of precedent, making rulings on statute alone - which means questions of law are much more easily resolved. Of course, replacing a country's entire justice system would be politically complex in the extreme. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641554 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641554

by op03 6y ago

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
- salawat 6y ago
  Yes... but also no. Again, the problem comes in in the fundamentals of velocity of information propagation, of which only half is open to unrestricted scalability. Namely, documents can be propagated at the speed of light. Understanding cannot. You can put every document exactly where I need it as soon as it is accessible, but unless I've had enough immersion in the jargon and specific ways of life of the profession, I'm going to need time to absorb and reckon what to do with it, and where to go next. Even if I do know what to look for, good luck hitting up any database of well cross-referenced case law without paying an exorbitant fee due to the nature of the returns of the profession, and the essentially captive audience to it. Most of those data sources areas fundamental to law as Machinery's Handbook to Machining, yet its locked up behind more imposing barriers to entry than Fort Knox; fiscal, temporal, and cultural. Short of a periodic collapse and simplification of case law such that the entire field can become more accessible so something less than a Guild/Cartel of highly exclusive barristers, I'm not seeing a fundamental opportunity to change things for the better.
  - salawat 6y ago
    To flesh out my thoughts, there are publicly accessible law libraries you can go to for working through the up to date case law by checking the registers and what not, but from my understanding this is a far slower process than using the tools most practicing attorneys pay rather large recurring access fees to. If there is a lawyer about, feel free to correct me, but I believe Westlaw is one, LexisNexis is another I think? It's been a while since I was deep in this vertical of research. What I do remember is that the difference in efficiency between someone who does have access to one of those systems vs. Someone who doesn't is essentially the difference between someone armed with Google Case Law Edition vs. someone working out of a card catalog. You can get an order of magnitude higher discoverability leading to potential alternate avenues for legal construction with one over the other. You can also get an idea of what approach any defense or counterpart might make by researching what your opponent would want since you're both working out of the same b o st of case law. If you're just looking to do one case and be done, the law library may work. If you're in court with any regularity, the rest of the profession has made your decision for you, and it's time to pony up for access to the big boy's toolset.

ashtonkem 6y ago

Is the court itself the limiting cost for litigation, or is it the lawyers representing the parties?

AniseAbyss 6y ago
Well if you are facing the government your adversary has practically limitless time and money... I'm glad I live in a country were lawyers still have some professional honor to take on cases that don't pay. But they have to subsidize poor clients with rich ones.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Right, but that's only really a problem because affording a lawyer for any amount of time is ruinously expensive. If lawyers were cheaper (or litigation much faster), even fighting the government would be affordable, even if it would be an awful experience in other, non-financial ways. Pro-bono stuff is a great and honorable tradition, but it's not enough. I worry about any system that depends on poor citizens being sympathetic enough to receive free legal representation as a charity from otherwise unaffordably expensive lawyers. It's clearly superior to locking all poor citizens away from legal representation, but it's not anywhere close to sufficient.

mattigames 6y ago

That doesn't make sense to me, such system would obviously get a percentage from each settlement/fine (e.g. 10%) to pay for the costs of running such system, the big cases would be the ones keeping the system afloat.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

I'm personally not looking forward to Judger - Uber, but for Justice.

kbenson 6y ago
While I get the joke, I think this is basically binding arbitration, which is a thing. It has its own set of upsides and downsides.
renewiltord 6y ago
You'll enjoy _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ then, in the way someone else might enjoy a slasher flick.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  as it happens that is one of the Heinlein books I consider worthwhile.
Threeve303 6y ago
Something tells me that out of the three new apps, Judger, Rural Juror, and Executioner, the executioner app will be the most popular.

distances 6y ago

> Where I live there is like 1 Judge for 300K ppl. And most places its worse. Out of interest, here's a map of judges per capita. It seems the situation in the US is especially bleak among western countries. https://en.actualitix.com/doc/maps/wld/world-map-professional-judges-by-country.jpg https://en.actualitix.com/doc/maps/wld/world-map-professiona...

tedsanders 6y ago
From my brief googling, this seems misleading. We have only ~1,700 Federal judges in the USA, but our parallel state system has ~30,000 judges, which are uncounted by your linked graph. https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publications/judge_faq.pdf https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/files/documents/publicati...
- distances 6y ago
  Well that explains! I was wondering what's going on there.

aww_dang 6y ago

From my perspective, I find it hard to approach without addressing the monopoly role the state plays in dispensing justice. Maybe others can add their thoughts about how to reform the current system towards these ends. That said, a privatized law system could potentially provide greater competition and lower costs overall. "Customary Law With Private Means of Resolving Disputes and Dispensing Justice: A Description Of a Modern System of Law and Order Without State Coercion" https://cdn.mises.org/9_2_2_0.pdf https://cdn.mises.org/9_2_2_0.pdf

finolex1 6y ago
Isn't commercial arbitration basically a privatized law system?
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Yes, for example both the employer and maid could sign a contract for arbitration. Insurance schemes and protections for both parties could be part of this. How it would work in practice would depend upon the specifics of the contracts and the quality of the arbitration. There's potential for both positive and negative outcomes. Ideally competition would create an equilibrium which benefits both parties. There's a very pessimistic, knee-jerk interpretation I'd like to address. Outcomes are in no way guaranteed to go one way or the other in this hypothetical. Better protections for workers would allow a larger pool of potential hires. This in turn could create a cost incentive for robust worker protection and liability. Insurers may guarantee the employer or employee by screening for potential misconduct. This is not to say that it would be a perfect system, but that there is a potential for incentives to work in both directions. With enough scrutiny by brighter minds than my own a workable framework might emerge.
  - ValentineC 6y ago
    Singapore has a government-run mediation centre for employment-related claims [1], and unresolved cases can advance to an employment tribunal [2] (where no lawyers are allowed) after. The difference in this case were the criminal charges. Like in most jurisdictions in the world, it would be pretty foolish of someone to represent themselves without being trained in criminal law and court procedure — especially when a failed attempt doesn't mean bankruptcy, but incarceration. [1] https://www.tal.sg/tadm https://www.tal.sg/tadm [2] https://www.statecourts.gov.sg/cws/ECT/Pages/An-Overview-of-the-Employment-Claims-Tribunals-(ECT).aspx https://www.statecourts.gov.sg/cws/ECT/Pages/An-Overview-of-...

michaelt 6y ago

In the German system, civil litigation is a lot faster and less expensive, despite having the same level of public satisfaction as much more expensive countries [1] I'm no expert on their system, but there's some regulation of lawyers' fees ('RVG') and also a different system of law - among other things, they do not recognise the concept of precedent, making rulings on statute alone - which means questions of law are much more easily resolved. Of course, replacing a country's entire justice system would be politically complex in the extreme. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641554 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641554