13 ms·

There are too many situations in our society where money wins because they hire better lawyers. The solution is not to make more money to hire better lawyers, b

• deanCommie 3y ago
  *American society. Not to say the problem is nonexistent in other countries, but American society minimizes laws (due to worries about government overreach) and hand-waives away concerns because either the legal system, or worse "the free market" will decide and make everything just. It incentivizes a complete lack of individual ethics in any decision. "Is it legal? Then we should do it." is the only question being asked.
  • fallingknife 3y ago
    > American society minimizes laws (due to worries about government overreach) Not sure how you come to that conclusion. Here's just one example of the opposite - almost 30% of US workers need a government license just to do their job: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2013/11/is-the-us-%E2%80%9Cover-licensed%E2%80%9D-the-case-for-reforming-america%E2%80%99s-professional-licensing https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2013/11/is-the-us-%E2%80%9Co...
    • lazyasciiart 3y ago
      That’s part of the same trend: instead of writing laws, the government just says “you must be licensed by x group” and then that group writes the rules.
  • robocat 3y ago
    > American society minimizes laws Not sure that is true. Moreover, contracts, legal threats, laws and liabilities are involved in most transactions, to a far higher extent than many other countries with more reasonable legal systems and laws. The USA is renowned for being an exceptionally litigious society. The USA is also known for its inequitable legal system where you can often win by spending more, and you can often lose just because you are poor. Eminent domain, plea bargains, 3 strikes, harsh minimum sentences, cowboy cops, frivolous lawsuits, ridiculous liabilities, lock and forget, zero rehabilitation, two speed society, defunding, Civil Forfeiture, Bankruptcy, IP laws, etcetera. Even assuming you have minimised laws (I really don’t think that is the case), the emergent effects of your legal structures are perverse and damaging to the US as a whole. The USA isn’t the worst in the world, but it is a long way from being good or fair.
    • jstarfish 3y ago
      It's true when it comes to criminal law. We don't enforce much of code unless someone outright admits to a crime or it's really high-profile. Civil law though? You need a private army of lawyers.
  • refurb 3y ago
    Your statement doesn't even make sense. How is "minimizing laws" make sense when people ask "Is it legal? Then we should do it." Sounds like following the letter of the law, not minimizing it.
    • MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I think the parent meant minimizing the aspects of the law that aren't written down with letters. Such as the moral/ethical component, and so on.
• fallingknife 3y ago
  They have small claims court for claims up to $10K or so depending on state which works great. Problem is if you go over that, then it's real court and $100K (or more) in fees to take something to trial. We need a medium claims court to bridge the gap for claims up to maybe $500K where it's still reasonably cheap to bring a case. Our civil courts are set up to be very good at resolving large complicated disputes between rich people or corporations, but it just doesn't work for regular people.
• emodendroket 3y ago
  You have to be joking if you don't think arbitration is a massive gift to moneyed interests. Why are they all cramming it down everyone's throat if not?
  • senectus1 3y ago
    not saying i disagree, but arbitration free's up court time.
    • emodendroket 3y ago
      That's hardly the concern of companies sticking mandatory arbitration agreements everywhere though.
  • danpalmer 3y ago
    This depends on the arbitration. An example of pro-consumer arbitration is the Tenancy Deposit Scheme in the UK. All tenancy deposits must be either stored with the UK-wide scheme, or at least insured by the scheme (at the landlord's expense). This is a non-governmental body, but use of it is mandated by legislation. When it comes time to get your deposit back, if the landlord decides to keep some, the tenant can challenge that, and what happens is essentially just arbitration. It doesn't go to court, it's decided by the TDS. The benefits are that the whole process is designed around deposit resolution, so it's much more streamlined than going to court. Also it doesn't require any outlay by either side to initiate a challenge, so it's effectively free. Both of these are much better for tenants and indeed for many landlords than navigating a costly court process. The TDS happens to be considered very pro-tenant, but ultimately this is just perception. I strongly suspect that the only reason it is considered so is because landlords tend to over-state damage or attempt to keep deposits for unreasonable things, and therefore the TDS ends up siding with the tenants more (I've heard ~80% anecdotally). Is there any difference here? I guess it's government mandated and funded by mandated fees, rather than needing to appeal to or sell to companies, and therefore the incentive structure is better?
    • emodendroket 3y ago
• breck 3y ago
  Going through a family court case now and your take is spot on. > reasonable support for pro se representation in court I've sat and watched about 100 cases. I've noticed if both parties are pro se, judges are usually reasonable. If one party is pro se and the other is not, well I've never seen the pro se party get even a fair chance. > lawyers win when people fight, and the more they fight, the more complicated the law and the case, the more wealth is transferred to the legal profession A friend is a Federal Judge and told me they have a term for it the "Family Law Cartel". He said he can describe Family Law Court with one word: "Cesspool".
  • _kbh_ 3y ago
    > If one party is pro se and the other is not, well I've never seen the pro se party get even a fair chance. Depends what you mean by a fair chance, a lot of the pro se stuff I have seen the judges effectively hold the hands of the pro se litigant and effectively interpret everything they say very favourably. Being pro se doesn’t mean you get to just chat with the judge to litigate the suite it’s meant to mean that you take on the role of a lawyer and are held to the same standards.
    • throwaway7070 3y ago
      This whole "pro se" being treated well by judges is not the reality I have experienced. I have been involved in a few cases over the last several years as a pro se litigant and I lost almost every motion I filed, despite the other (represented) side's position being obviously frivolous. However, I also ghostwrote motions for attorneys in those cases as well, and when those motions are signed by an attorney they succeeded every single time. It seems like unless a lawyer signs a filing it will be outright ignored by many judges.
• pclmulqdq 3y ago
  To be perfectly honest, if you're planning on making a few hundred thousand dollars a year, you probably should be happy to spend a few thousand on a lawyer to help you with it, no matter how simple or where you are. The math just works out a lot better to spend the money upfront to prevent "gotcha" moments than to lose tons of money on the backend either to a loophole or over having to sue. This is a textbook case where an ounce of prevention is worth several pounds of cure. If you are signing or writing a contract worth 6 figures, get a lawyer/solicitor involved early. It's worth it.
  • 8192kjshad09- 3y ago
    True, but impractical. You're essentially saying every employee should have a lawyer look over their employment contract every time they get a new job? They _SHOULD_, but is it really practical to expect people to?
    • bcrosby95 3y ago
      Everyone should spend 1-2% of their yearly salary on a lawyer whenever they sign an employment contract? The world is so fucked.
      • HarryHirsch 3y ago
        In the past, the employer's lawyer would negotiate with the union's lawyer, but we can't have nice things.
        • junofan 3y ago
          [flagged]
          • drewcoo 3y ago
            Downvoted because I'm tired of seeing anti-union propaganda on Hacker News. Can we stop yet? Please?
• _heimdall 3y ago
  For me, the most frustrating part of our legal system is the bastardization of jury trials. The entire point of a jury trial is to let a group of peers decide whether they were willing to punish a citizen for the crime they were committed of. Laws come down to moral opinion, and jury trials are a way for the public to answer the question of what the general moral opinion of the time is. The jury decides (a) was a law broken, (b) dotthey agree with the law, and (c) are they willing to punish someone for it. This creates case law and ultimately should impact laws on the books - if people continue to acquit convictions because the crime isn't worth punishing, eventually the law should be changed. Instead lawyers and judges have done an extremely effective job flipping the tables and telling juries their only job is to read a list of laws the court deemed relevant, hear evidence the court deemed important, and decide if the logic between fact and law holds true. Juries are pushed to consider only the statutes in question as written and aren't expected or asked to consider for themselves if the crime is something they even think matters.
  • dclusin 3y ago
    Jury nullification doesn’t exactly have a spotless history. Although I do agree with the sentiment.
    • _heimdall 3y ago
      The legal system itself doesn't have a spotless history. I just don't see the point in a hurry trial if we aren't asking representatives of the community to weigh in on the law and punishment itself. If all we want is a system where legal statues are presented and evidence is compared against it, we really don't need a jury at all and might as well let the judge or OpenAI decide on what if basically boiled down to a mathematical equation.
  • js2 3y ago
    > Juries are pushed to consider only the statutes in question as written and aren't expected or asked to consider for themselves if the crime is something they even think matters. Doing otherwise is known as nullification and you'll never sit on a jury if you even imply you know such a thing exists. Here's Paul Newman's character in the The Verdict arguing for it though: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechtheverdict.html https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechth... (The movie is well worth watching and pairs well with 12 Angry Men, both directed by Sidney Lumet.)
• hsn915 3y ago
  What exactly are you proposing here? > I don't know if people have noticed, but lawyers win when people fight People have disagreements. It's inevitable. It seems like you want people to never disagree on anything. But it's unclear how that can ever be possible. > Judges cannot and should not look down on self-representing litigants Is that not already the case? Is there anything preventing anyone from representing themselves?
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    One idea would be getting back to how the country was founded. It's amazing that some of the most critical legal concepts in our nation are written down in a sentence or two. There is indeed ambiguity that the courts are left to sort out but, in many ways, that's a feature more than a bug. For instance this is the entirety of the 1st Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." If that was written today, it would be 700 pages long and packed with irrelevancies and obfuscation. The goal of those 700 pages was, at some point, to provide clarity, but that's obviously been an abysmal failure. In practice nobody knows exactly what they mean, even including the people signing it into law. And even those who do study those 700 pages will frequently come up with radically different interpretations. So you gain nothing, but make things completely incomprehensible to near 100% of the population. And the same is true of contracts and the like. People are increasingly governed and compelled by language that may as well be Greek. [1] - https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text
  • throwaway7070 3y ago
    Self-represented litigants are treated extremely unfairly compared to represented litigants. I have been involved in three trial court cases where I represented myself ("pro se"). I won about 10% of dozens of motions I wrote and personally signed. Worse, in most of those cases the other side's lawyer was arguing a position obviously contrary to law, won anyway, and forced me to engage in extremely time consuming appeals process to correct the error. Amazingly, I have ghostwritten about a dozen motions for co-parties represented by counsel and their counsel signed it. The success rate of those motions has been 100%. At least with the three judges I have had, it seems like my filings were outright ignored and not read. As soon as a lawyer affixed their signature to my writing, the judge read it and took it seriously enough to apply the law correctly. I know there is a lot of propaganda about self-represented litigants being treated fairly or with kid-gloves, but my personal experience suggests this is false.
• irjustin 3y ago
  While I appreciate the thought, it seems unrealistic. > I'd like to see short contracts, arbitration, and reasonable support for pro se representation in court The problem is in "short contracts". Short contracts are only helpful when both sides are "willing to work together" and the "spirit" of the contract is friendly. An example is a YC term sheet compared to Business Loan contract. Once you get into an us vs them, you better hope your contract spells out exactly what happens to you and that it is in your favor. If the contract is short, it leaves a lot of details open ended and all of a sudden interpretation sets in, "spirit of contract" sets in and the judge becomes the arbiter of how your contract gets decided. Better hope that particular judge likes you. Instead of hoping that the judge/jury likes you, which is a game of dice, you write it into the contract up front and thusly we're back at complex, lawyer ridden contracts.
  • oatmeal1 3y ago
    The problem is courts falsely find that there was a meeting of the minds when a corporation with a legal team writing a 15 page agreement even when they are contracting with someone that has a 5th grade reading level. If courts were strict about limiting the ability of those with legal representation to write advantageous terms that give them advantage over those without council, there wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue.
    • pclmulqdq 3y ago
      They are pretty strict about what can be in employment contracts, particularly in states like NY and CA. The contract at issue here wasn't an employment contract, it was a copyright license. That license was likely written with lawyers on both sides and clients who are informed about the tradeoffs.
      • irjustin 3y ago
        This is largely true of contracts that are wide spread enough where it affects a non trivial amount of the general public. Housing loans, standard employment contracts, car loans, etc.
• sirspacey 3y ago
  It’s important to acknowledge that judges, politicians, and lawyers are aware of this and design the legal process to feed their ecosystem. In that context this isn’t a tough problem, it is unsolvable.
• raynr 3y ago
  I understand the sentiment and agree with it, but I think you have the cause backwards. It's not so much that lawyers win when people fight, the problem is lawyers. It's that people fight. The problem is people. And life is complicated, so when people fight, all of the simplification you desire - short contracts, arbitration, support for people to represent themselves - will very quickly succumb to the myriad of edge cases life will throw at it. So over time, you'll get complicated long contracts and complex procedural dispute resolution processes, requiring someone with specialised, deep knowledge of the process and precedents and who will advocate on your behalf, for a fee. You know, lawyers. People fight. That's why lawyers win.
• drewcoo 3y ago
  1> There are too many situations in our society where money wins because they hire better lawyers. 2>The solution is not to make more money to hire better lawyers, but to change the system so such a step isn't necessary. 3> I don't know if people have noticed, but lawyers win when people fight, and the more they fight, the more complicated the law and the case, the more wealth is transferred to the legal profession. 4 (Everyone go limp here, please! No fighting in court, ok? Just don't) ??? 5 Profit!!! (Nobody stopped fighting. Nobody stopped being in court. You wanted that? Sucker! Someone profited from your noninvolvement.) Seriously? Yes we need reform, but if lawyers are the most powerful bloc, how do we get them onboard? Would you convince them to treat law like golf, with handicaps? Would you somehow motivate other goals more than winning (at the risk of subverting justice)? What?
• dubcee349 3y ago
  And if you have enough money you buy a supreme court justice.
• mmcnl 3y ago
  I would think legal ambiguity is at the benefit of those who have good lawyers. So changing the system could mean: better legislation and better protection for regular citizens and employees.
• zoiksmeboiks 3y ago
  There are too many situations where minor semantic quibbles are blown up into huge behavior problems; technicalities they lawyers would call them. It happens across social contexts. I’m convinced human language is good for nothing but the human equivalent of prompt injection. Humanoids went millions of years before language intuiting “enough” food, warmth. We evolved to measure the gradients that make up our emotions. Social philosophy short circuits that connection to self. Religion forced humans to serve a shared hallucination. Nation states are a similar constraint on human state. There’s evidence in neuroscience teenage brains devalue moms voice for new info sources. Does not seem unreasonable this could be a lifelong thing. 13-14 years ago cloud and crud apps took off, now we’re moving onto AI. Pop culture trends seem to fluctuate around similar timelines, though I admit to not measuring it. Just thinking out loud. Obligation to preserve social language norms may one day be found to be a cause of much mental illness. We evolved for quite a while without them.
• BrandoElFollito 3y ago
  Another solution is to make the law stiff and closed. In France we have a labour law that codifies everything. There is no place for negotiation and for a typical contract you barely need to read it as it has to be according to the law. Notice period, vaction, all this is fixed. Same when you buy a house. You get a contract that is always the same and where you cannot put unexpected clauses. There are more similar cases so the everyday life of a generic citizen is legally predictable.
  • MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Surely not every house? There are thousands of edges cases surrounding real property, so I can't imagine the standard contract has thousands of clauses.
    • BrandoElFollito 3y ago
      I do not know about every case of course, but in any case I know it was a long read ay the notary office where the content was the same each time. I owned three apartments and it was all the same every time. My brother bought two houses - same. Similar for friends. I am not sure what can vary from house to house which is not handled by the regulation. The pre-contract and contract elements are all very strict (who pays what, what the engagements are and it is not negotiable), the the house must adhere to the code except when listed, there is a time where you can raise issues that must be fixed etc. To be clear, I do not doubt that there are edge cases but in the, say, 50 cumulated cases I know of there has never been a deviation from the standard contract. The value of the notary in France is to gather evidence, check that everything is there and read the contract over an hour or so. If it was more digitalized, I think we could bypass that part entirely for standard purchases.
• 1letterunixname 3y ago
  The American way. Look at the political system. Campaign finance reform will never happen because the establishment and corruption are synonymous with the pretense of lobbyists making delivering cash not under a table seem seemly.