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File a small claim for damages up to 10,000 to 20,000 USD depending on your local statues. It’s actually pretty quick and easy. They cannot defend themselves
by MrDarcy 1y ago
File a small claim for damages up to 10,000 to 20,000 USD depending on your local statues.
It’s actually pretty quick and easy. They cannot defend themselves with lawyers, so a director usually has to show up.
- voxic11 1y agoIn all US states corporations may be represented by lawyers in small claims cases. The actual difference is that in higher courts corporations usually must be represented by lawyers whereas many states allow normal employees to represent corporations when defending small claims cases, but none require it.
- judge2020 1y agoNot to mention that they have general council, who are lawyers but also just employees.
- JeffMcCune 1y agoThis is not accurate. I filed a claim against Bungalow in Oregon. They petitioned the judge to allow their in house attorney I was dealing with to represent them. The judge denied the request citing the Oregon statute that attorneys may not participate in small claims proceedings. Bungalow flew out their director of some division who was ill prepared. Slam dunk. took all of 6-8 hours of my time end to end. The claim was a single page document. Got the max award allowable. Would have got more had it been California. 55.090 Appearance by parties and attorneys; witnesses. (1) Except as may otherwise be provided by ORS 55.040, no attorney at law nor any person other than the plaintiff and defendant shall become involved in or in any manner interfere with the prosecution or defense of the litigation in the department without the consent of the justice of the justice court, nor shall it be necessary to summon witnesses.
- socalgal2 1y agoI’m guessing you got luck and most justices consent?
- JeffMcCune 1y agoWhy would you guess that? Most justices concern themselves with statute.
- tedivm 1y agoThis is just so inaccurate, at least for California.
- dymk 1y agoAnd now your Gmail account has been deleted as well as any other accounts you had with Google
- bmacho 1y agoThat's okay, you have backup of your data, and you don't really depend on your Gmail account for anything important.
- dymk 1y agoI’ve probably got about a thousand accounts that use a Gmail account as the associated email / username. I doubt this is uncommon compared to the number of people with custom domains.
- account42 1y agoThe problem here wouldn't be the data but all the people whose only (or at least primary) way to reach you is the Gmail address.
- ryandrake 1y agoSo what? Why would you want to continue to use the services of a company you had to sue? That’s kind of a “burning the bridges” moment.
- dymk 1y agoThe whole problem is vendor lock in. Changing your email address if you’ve had it long is not straightforward or easy.
- Teever 1y agoI've been thinking for a while that a coordinated and massive action against a specific company by people all claiming damages in small claims court would be a very effective way of bringing that company to heel.
- Eisenstein 1y agoI wonder how that will work with mandatory arbitration clauses. Guess you don't know until you try.
- Teever 1y agoSwimmingly. It apparently works swimmingly.[0] Another idea that's worth investigating are coordinated payment strikes on leveraged companies that offer monthly services like telco companies. A bunch of their customers going "Oops, guess I can't afford to pay this month, gonna have to eat that 2% late fee next month, or maybe the month after that, or maybe the month after that" on a service that won't be disconnected in the first month could absolutely crush a company that requires that monthly income to pay their debt. [0] https://jacobin.com/2022/05/mass-arbitration-mandatory-agreements-uber-amazon https://jacobin.com/2022/05/mass-arbitration-mandatory-agree...
- bityard 1y agoI was under the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled that mandatory arbitration clauses were indeed mandatory. Meaning, if you are subject to a mandatory arbitration clause in some contract, it removes ALL ability for a plaintiff to sue a company. But, good news, it seems like they are walking back on that. They recently ruled that lower courts must "pause" a suit and the suit can resume if an agreement is not made through arbitration. https://www.bressler.com/news-supreme-court-clarifies-mandatory-stay-requirement-under-the-federal-arbitration-act https://www.bressler.com/news-supreme-court-clarifies-mandat...
- immibis 1y agoValve tried this. But there's no class action arbitration. Meaning that instead of a single class action suit, they had thousands of individual arbitration cases and they were actually begging people to sue them instead. So we could just do that. If they want mandatory arbitration they can have mandatory arbitration. From half of us, just in case it doesn't work.
- mcv 1y agoIt would be glorious if everybody unjustly screwed by Google did that. Barring antitrust enforcement, this may be the only way to force them to behave.
- 93po 1y agoit wouldn't work. they'd hire some minimum wage person to go to all of them and just read the terms and conditions you agreed to that include language about arbitration or whatever
- 14 1y agoHow did they agree to those terms?
- hallway_monitor 1y agoProbably includes something insane like "By allowing your website to be crawled by google spiders, you agree to the following terms...."
- account42 1y agoOk, by not objecting withing 5 seconds you hereby agree to let me shoot you in the head.
- Tryk 1y agoTerms of service, written by a corporation, do not overrule the law, of a country.
- account42 1y agoEspecially not when the plaintiff isn't even a user of the service.
- account42 1y agoDo small claims apply to things like this where damages are indirect?
- MrDarcy 1y agoI believe so. For me it was helpful to visualize getting up and convincing the judge of the damages. I’d run a PnL, get average daily income from visitors, then claim that loss as damages. In court I’d bring a simple spreadsheet showing the hole in income as evidence of damages. If there were contractors to help get the site back up I’d claim their payments as damages and include their invoices as evidence.