3 ms·
You would win and then find out the company assets are $10,000 worth of office furniture, a k-cup machine, and a network switch.
by criddell 3y ago
You would win and then find out the company assets are $10,000 worth of office furniture, a k-cup machine, and a network switch.
- qingcharles 3y agoWhat flavor K-Cups are we talking? And is the switch 10/100?
- rolph 3y agoi would accept that as compensation, its a good start for a haxspace.
- borski 3y agoSplit across everyone in the class?
- rolph 3y agohttps://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/how-start-class-action-lawsuit/ https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/personal-injury/how-sta... not authoritative, but general trend is ~ 40 plaintiff are acceptable minimum cohort for a class, but that can be even smaller, a class of 1 is feasible but very uncommon.
- afavour 3y agoUnfortunately you’re going to need to pay the lawyers that won you the case too.
- coding123 3y agoThere's some guy out there doing this kind of thing without lawyers and wins every time, and is making a living on it. It was posted on HN some years ago.
- ronsor 3y agoSurely it can't be that easy?
- pavel_lishin 3y agoThe hard part is actually identifying the U.S. business entity. Or actually identifying the entity at all!
- jonathankoren 3y agoIpython. They’re posting all over this story
- rolph 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37003348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37003348
- rolph 3y agothey are welcome to enjoy a latte and a few rounds of chocolate doom, anytime. also tradesies on office furniture.
- jonathankoren 3y agoSo? They did the work. No one complains when you pay a plumber, or gasp an engineer. The lawyers can take some office chairs as well.
- afavour 3y agoThe point is that if your potential earnings cap out at $10k there's a very good chance you're going to end up paying more in legal fees than you ever make in a settlement and leave yourself at a net loss.
- jonathankoren 3y agoYou don’t do it to make money. You do it to make them lose.
- afavour 3y agoI assure you most people do it to make money and the vast majority to at least not lose money. And they don’t even really lose anyway, it’s just a cost of doing business. Just spin up another company and get back to the call sheet.
- dclowd9901 3y agoThe cost of losing is small and the cost of restarting again is small. Meanwhile, the potential upside of even one call netting a sale is very large. I reckon two calls netting sales would have paid for this fine. We have hucksters abusing legitimate business structures. I think we need an “in good faith” escape clause for LLCs that captures folks that abuse them.
- rvcdbn 3y agoNot a lawyer but seems like the kind of behavior that would or at least should pierce limited liability.
- ghayes 3y agoYeah, the interesting case here is Johnson and Johnson [0], which is best explained by Matt Levine. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-levine-johnson-johnson-s-jnj-bankruptcy-didn-t-work https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-l...
- tomrod 3y agoAgain, seems like it should pierce limited liability. The shell company stood up to take the fall should be immaterial.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jackmott42 3y agoI wish that US law enforcement, who likes to act all tough when dealing with helpless poor people, would instead act tough with white collar criminals. Instead of taking their fake SWAT team units into twitch streamers homes and to schools where they sit there and let kids get murdered, imagine them storming into Theranos and yanking them straight to jail, and then having a speedy trial, rather than wasting years of our tax dollars to slap them on the wrist.
- nerdponx 3y agoDon't we all? This is the #1 pipe dream of any "commoner" who has lived in organized society since the dawn of history.
- borski 3y agoTo be fair, Theranos didn’t get slapped on the wrist. They’re going to prison for many years.
- hotsauceror 3y agoSeems to me like 'defrauding some of the most powerful people in the world, misdiagnosing serious diseases, and harassing a whistleblower to the point where he killed himself' is an awfully high bar to clear in order for white-collar crime to be taken seriously. They fined Jammie Thomas, like, $800,000 dollars for downloading 30 songs off of napster or whatever. As far as I know, she didn't get to plead 'inability to pay'.
- borski 3y agoYou moved the goalposts. The example was Theranos. I was responding about Theranos. That was the extent of my comment.
- mcv 3y agoI think GP makes a totally valid point. Big companies only get punished hard when they defraud powerful people, normal people get punished hard for doing something a company doesn't like. It really does seem the harshest punishments are handed out for hurting people/companies more powerful than you. The rich and powerful, including corporations, should be held more accountable. Instead, the law seems to get used mostly to keep people in their place. I still remember how HSBC got fined millions for laundering billions for Mexican drug cartels. Normal people would be doing hard time if they did that. Banks get fined less than the size of the crime.