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Kleiner Perkins says Pao is asking for $2.7M not to appeal
- themartorana 11y ago"Kleiner's lawyers say that Pao can't use the recent California Supreme Court ruling to invalidate Kleiner's request for more than $800,000 in expert witness fees because Pao “failed to accept a reasonable settlement offer” before the lawsuit went to trial." So... Are they claiming that not accepting a settlement is the same as malicious intent?
- jeffmould 11y agoIANAL, but essentially in a civil case if the plaintiff is offered a settlement by the defendant and the plaintiff turns down said settlement and later on the plaintiff either loses the case or ends up winning or settling for less than the first offer the plaintiff gives up the ability to have the defendant pay legal fees in the case. Essentially it works like this. If I sue you for $100000, and you offer a settlement for $50,000 but I refuse, we go to court and I am only awarded $40,000 I would owe you all your legal fees from the time you offered me the initial settlement. There is a legal term for it, but there again, IANAL so I can't remember it.
- guan 11y agoAs I understand it, it’s not about legal costs in the sense of the fees that Kleiner’s lawyers were paid, but rather costs for expert witnesses and other non-lawyer costs. Specifically, $864,680 in expert witness fees, $59,000 in deposition costs, and $40,000 in other costs. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner-perkins-asks-ellen-pao-for-nearly-1-million-in-costs-after-trial/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner-perkins-a... It’s not impossible to recover your lawyers’ fees too, but it is quite hard in the American system and you would have to show malicious intent, and there’s no similar mechanism where you make a settlement offer and can then recover based on that.
- jeffmould 11y agoYou are right, it is not the lawyers fees, but the costs associated with the case, like you said the expert witnesses, copying documents, court fees, etc... that are owed.
- MCRed 11y agoI'm a little surprised they offered her the original $1M. Which I guess means a counter is legitimate, who knows what the legal costs are for Kleiner. But this is starting to feel a bit dirty. "You may have won the case, but I can make it expensive for you still." Then again, you could say that about anybody who sues anybody. The real problem here is that legal cases are so expensive many startups live in dread of them. In bigger businesses they save a great deal of time and money by using arbitrattion- both parties agree on an arbiter and pay the arbiters fee. I read some American Arbitration Association (I think it was) claims several years ago that they were much larger and more effective than the current legal system- hearing more cases and with better customer satisfaction. Apparently even losers like it, if they lost but felt the hearing was fair. Probably Pao and Kleiner would have both saved a lot of money if they'd been able to resolve the dispute this way-- IIRC the court ruled Pao owed kleiner money already for recovered legal fees.
- joshuapants 11y agoI worked for a while on the same floor as a lawyer who pivoted into arbitration. She had tons of business and usually managed to settle things at a lower cost and higher degree of satisfaction than cases that went to trial.
- walshemj 11y agoThe point about comprise agreement is they are meant to be confidential. Looks like Kleiner Perkins is playing hard ball possibly not the best tactic given the high profile nature of the case.
- SilasX 11y agoUnfortunately, the limiting force on all that is that you can't opt out of the legal system itself, which retains veto power over any such moves. Even if you found an arbitration procedure that reached the same rulings at a fraction of the cost and 100x faster, you have to get the other party's consent to do it, and as long as they have to consent, they can use that leverage to impose disproportionate costs, regardless of the merit of their side.
- brighteyes 11y ago
- joshuapants 11y ago>Before the trial started in February, Pao’s husband, Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., was ordered by a New York state judge to pay $2.7 million to a law firm that represented him in his racial discrimination complaint against the famed Dakota apartments in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. [1] What an astonishingly coincidental sum [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao-said-to-seek-2-7-million-to-walk-away-from-gender-lawsuit http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao-said-t... Warning, autoplay video
- colinbartlett 11y agoI keep seeing this argument made and I don't buy it. Certainly the sums of both cases are not exactly $2.7M. Those are just rounded numbers. And certainly there is some very specific list of expenses somewhere justifying that request. Plus, if her husband owes that debt isn't it reasonable to surmise he owes others? Do you really think she would take the specific amount her husband owes in an unrelated case and the demand that exact amount from an unaffiliated party in an unrelated case? This is nonsense. Coincidental indeed and not even a very strong coincidence. It's rounding.
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- spcoll 11y agoPeople on here love to hate on Ellen because she's a woman who made it as CEO of a popular tech company. The white male nerds on HN will use any conspiracy theory or baseless attack on her character to try to discredit her. When you're full of hate, you're not going to let logic or facts stop you from hating and spewing lies...
- nateabele 11y agoWow, what a convenient way to derail any potential criticism of what many people see as absurd positions & silly missteps. I see you also quietly slipped in an ad hominem. I'm surprised you didn't go for the trifecta and blame The Patriarchy™.
- thomasatethose 11y agowhat a weird number. sounds like its connected with buddy fletcher, her husband. he owes 2.7 million. http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against-former-ny-hedgie-buddy-fletcher/ http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against-former-ny-h...
- brighteyes 11y agoThis seems like a popular conspiracy theory. But in what way does it make sense? Yes, the numbers are close, but 1) Why not pick a larger number, if there is legal basis to ask for it? Is there a benefit to winning the exact amount they owe somewhere else, aside from trolling? More money would be better, wouldn't it? 2) Why not pick a smaller number, if just a little, to avoid the similarity in the number (such similarities are noticed, as you are doing)? It seems more likely that 2.7M is a number that they can justify legally. It may also have been justifiable legally in another lawsuit. Yes, it seems like an interesting coincidence. So what? The same thing happened with the 16M figure from earlier in her trial - it appears both as a possible maximum willful damages number from her lawsuit, assuming she won, and somewhere in the legal proceedings of her husband's hedge fund. Again, an interesting coincidence, but the same objections arise. Overall, the fact that people pored through all the numbers in her lawsuit, and all the numbers in her husbands affairs (one lawsuit, one hedge fund fiasco), and found some dots to connect, seems to say more about people looking for patterns than about Pao and her husband.
- ibrahima 11y agoThe article says that number is her legal expenses, right? So it seems pretty straightforward where that number came from.
- dataker 11y agoThis summarizes it https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/timeline_part_2.jpeg?quality=80 https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/timeline_p...
- robbles 11y agoIsn't this just blackmail? "Pay me $2.7M or I'll continue my case against you"
- colinbartlett 11y agoThis is how all civil suits work, no?
- superuser2 11y agoThat's pretty much what settlement is.
- brighteyes 11y agoNo more than "drop the appeal or we'll demand 1M in lawyer's fees in the case you lost." You can see both as blackmail, or both as legal positioning looking for a settlement in the middle. I will say though, that after losing, to ask for such a high number is very brazen on her part.
- robbles 11y agoThe difference I see there (IANAL) is that they are asking for that 1M to recoup their legal fees as the winners of the case, and offering to waive them if the case is closed. Not sure if they're definitively entitled to that money, but at least it's the other way round. Asking for millions of $ as the losing plaintiff to not continue the case and cause more expenses for the defendant seems like a pretty clear case of blackmail to me however. Is it still settlement when you've already lost?
- timr 11y agoIf you have a valid appeal, you haven't "already lost" -- you have a case that's working its way through the courts. The legal system isn't sportsball, and you aren't being a sore loser if you appeal your case to a higher court. If someone gives up their right to appeal, that obviously has a financial benefit for the other party. It's not underhanded to admit it, and use it as a negotiation tactic.
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- detcader 11y agoThe extreme attention applied to all these stories arises out of the need of men in tech and finance to document the proof that women are liars and tricksters -- that these legal cases are all individual anecdotes doesn't matter. You can always tell when a headline on HN is about a woman in a gender discrimination situation, usually on the "losing" end, i.e. "look at what the Women's Libbers have created, these demon women who will use PC feminism to sue and get as much money out of some poor company as they can, even when it's been proven they are wrong". It's always a very vague headline, because all of the men whose eyes are on the story already know all the details, as it is with all of these "high-profile court cases". The implicit draw of these stories, at the heart, is "she thought she was a victim and she was wrong". If you want a more honest illustration of the reason why this story is being so focused on, look at the Ars Technica comment section.
- dmix 11y agoDo you have any examples of women winning (or losing) discrimination case that get covered on tech sites like Arstechnica? ... tech sites that have articles frequently on the frontpage of HN. If you're trying to establish a pattern, I'd be curious to see other examples? This seems pretty atypical and quite an interesting story by itself. Big silicon valley VC firms aren't often in high-publicity law suits.
- leereeves 11y agoThe extreme attention applied to discrimination, harassment, and civil rights issues in the US is a cultural phenomenon that goes far beyond women in tech.
- steven2012 11y agoI disagree with a lot of the decisions, both personal and business, that this person has made over the course of the last several years, including the decisions not to take the 1M settlement, and then to ask for 2.7M. It makes me wonder what sort of CEO she is at reddit, which I love immensely. Her decision to implement a no-negotiations salary is interesting though, I wonder if they pay higher or lower than what candidates are wanting.
- charlesdm 11y agoNo-negotiations salary? You can bet she negotiated her own salary. Then again, she seems to be digging herself a pit hard to get out of.
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- hoodoof 11y agoUgh. Super rich people fighting.
- vijayr 11y agoI'm not sure this is serving any purpose to any side - the only people who are going to come out happy are the lawyers, probably :(
- hayd 11y agoI've not seen this story on Reddit... Weird.
- rand334 11y agoThey've been actively censoring stories about Pao for months. This is nothing new.
- wodenokoto 11y agoOpen your eyes. It was on the front page and the comments were terrible.