Comment by grellas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grellas | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for your clarifications on products law (I am not a tort lawyer).

On the other hand, I am an experienced litigator and the points I made about litigation process, etc. are spoken from real-world experience going back many years and including a federal clerkship and Big Law tenure where I had lots of experience in seeing how class actions worked in practice. I have simplified those points in order to avoid legal technicalities and have instead tried to express them in terms of their practical effect (which, in the world of class-action lawyering, has much more to do with legal shakedowns than it does with formalities such as proximate cause or actual injuries suffered by individual plaintiffs).

Would be happy to talk further offline if you like - just email me.

First, I am sufficiently embarrassed that I neglected to check your profile. I slightly remembered your name, but could not remember why. Then I refreshed my recollection by viewing your profile and remember your Startup Law 101 posts.

I tend to side with letting the courts do their job. Yes, legal shakedowns certainly occur. I am more worried about smaller companies being affected than large ones, though. But that worry comes from much less legal experience than you.

Is it too idealistic to think that Rule 11 limits the scope and frequency of legal shakedowns?

Too idealistic, in my judgment, to see Rule 11 as having that effect (for others, this is a rule generally allowing federal courts to impose sanctions for frivolous or bad faith conduct in litigation). That said, I am not hostile to courts and would be the first to say that they serve us well on many fronts - that is what saddens me all the more about the way litigation can be so ill-used in our society as well.

Like any other tool litigation can be used or abused. It's unfortunate that a lot of abuses have gone unpunished and that more people (and companies) are taking these bad examples as 'the way to do it' because everybody else is doing it too.

This is not a purely American thing, though I would definitely contend that the United States has seen some of the worst excesses of this.

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