A long form of agreement?
Madanthonywayne said:
Nevertheless, the system is badly in need of reform. Under the current rules, it's primarily as a source of income for lawyers rather than a way to ensure that justice is served.
That pertains in some way to lawsuits in general. Excepting certain cases, such as, say,
trying to sue a pop band into bankruptcy, the outer limit tends to be the destruction of an entity by lawsuits. Comparatively few companies suffering massive legal exposure are sued into bankruptcy, and relatively few—if any—of those are driven under by the settlement.
So imagine an individual lawsuit, the first of its class, that brings the claimant a $3m award. How many of those awards can a company endure? Imagine, then, losing 100,000 of those suits. The company would be
destroyed by $300b plus its legal costs over. Better to lump those people into an actionable class, pay out $3b over ten years. But either way,
lawyers are going to laugh all the way to the bank.
Of course, here we encounter a difficult proposition for the capitalist. On the one hand, if lawyers didn't make so much money from winning lawsuits (as much as 30% of each settlement or award won), they might not be so inclined to file whatever claims come their way. To the other, capping legal fees can be regarded as interrupting the "free market".
Unfortunately, the solutions most often proposed generally seek to discourage the filing of lawsuits in general. If one alleges discrimination in the workplace, it might turn out that, while they are right, they are also outmatched. Thus, an injustice might remain, and the claimant is responsible for massive fees to, say, a dozen lawyers who only obfuscated the law and facts. In the end, small businesses that might only be able to afford one or two lawyers would remain vulnerable, but large corporations would find some degree of shelter.
And let us consider the
Ledbetter decision, in which the Supreme Court held in an opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito that a claimant must bring a complaint within a certain period, even if the evidence doesn't emerge until afterward. Indeed, continuing to benefit from the original offense does not compound the offense. Sure, Congress corrected the situation, but we don't apply the logic of the
Ledbetter ruling in other facets of society. Would we mark the statute of limitations for domestic violence or sexual abuse according to the first incident? Maybe render longtime drug users immune to prosecution since the first offense was so long ago? Fraud complaints? What about pollution laws?
Should one be obliged to pay for a corporation's legal defense all the way to the Supreme Court when the decision isn't that the company never did wrong, but the novel assessment that only the first offense counts, and any subsequent repetitions of the offense are tacked to the original for the purposes of a statute of limitations?
It seems much more logical to rein in the lawyers than to discourage people with legitimate claims from pursuing remedy under the law simply because it's too expensive to do so.
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Notes:
"Negativland". Wikipedia. Updated January 21, 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativland
Hirsch, Jeffrey M. "Analysis of the Ledbetter Bill". Workplace Prof Blog. September 16, 2008. http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2008/09/ledbetter.html
Alito, JJ Samuel. Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber #05-1074. United States Supreme Court. May 29, 2007. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/05-1074.ZS.html
