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Comment by uptownfunk | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I've watched too much Suits and The Good Wife, but it just seems that it's all futile. They're a huge corp, if you file suit against them they'll hit back harder with bigger and badder lawyers, and you either settle out of court, or play the lotto with the court system and try your hand at a judgement with whatever lawyers you can afford. It's really sad how stacked the odds seem.

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Why is this being modded down? It's the truth. Big companies almost always come out on top in trials because they can afford the best lawyers, and they can afford to game the system to bankrupt their opponents by filing never-ending motions to delay and other tactics which increase the legal costs to the opponent. You're almost never going to get a positive result if you're a rank-and-file employee; your best course of action is to leave the company and find something better.

It's not just the best lawyers. Uber have already started contacting anyone who knows Susan Fowler, digging for dirt on her.

How can you be so sure it was Uber? Susan's tweet was intentionally vague [0].

You are forgetting that some past and present employees that could be directly implicated by Susan's evidence may also choose the smear campaign route to save their hide.

This could range from the women in HR* who might get thrown under the bus by Uber for aiding and abetting, to the men that perpetrated the actual harassment.

*Of course this scenario playing out is highly unlikely given Uber's history.

[0] https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833

Isn't uber known for this? I remember them responding to a lawsuit or something by hiring PIs to get dirt on people - stuff beyond the merits of the case.

They've always ended up looking

Yes, they have threatened to dig up dirt on reporters and have even hired former CIA agents to go after information on someone who is suing them.

>Uber have already started contacting anyone who knows Susan Fowler, digging for dirt on her.

What a fantastic opportunity to send those assholes on a wild goose chase. Even better if they can somehow feed Uber bullshit that they later end up hanging themselves with.

That's risky, they don't need the truth they just need to be able to defend a liable suit.

Not judging cause the facts aren't fully known yet, but..

Doesn't matter. Court of law !== Court of public opinion. In fact, courts sometimes suspiciously follow the public mood.

Seems there is some recent evidence, in sexual harassment matters:

--Single accuser, no-one believes you --20 accusers, no one believes the accused

The floodgates don't open until #1 goes public, and more follow.

I personally know someone who went through this (related to IP, not sexual harassment). I understand the lawsuit dragged on for about seven years. He finally got awarded about eight million dollars in damages but hasn't been able to collect a single cent of it.

When Peter Thiel says "single digit millionaires have no effective access to the legal system" [1] on the surface that sounds laughable and out-of-touch but I think there's a lot more truth to this than most people would like to admit.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.de/peter-thiel-hulk-hogan-gawker-...

How does that work: He got awarded the money but can't collect it?

Between appeals and that verdicts won't normally contain anything about how promptly payments must be made, things can drag on a while, then there's the simple honest stuff like, "the whole board must meet to approve expenditures over $X" and the settlement will be over that $X.

That's completely typical in the US court system. Winning a judgment is completely separate from actually collecting that judgment, and entails extra legal work to go after the assets of someone who refuses to pay the judgment.

"Why is this being modded down? It's the truth. Big companies almost always come out on top in trials because they can afford the best lawyers, and they can afford to game the system to bankrupt their opponents by filing never-ending motions to delay and other tactics which increase the legal costs to the opponent. You're almost never going to get a positive result if you're a rank-and-file employee; your best course of action is to leave the company and find something better. "

You claim this is the truth. On what do you base any of this, other than TV?

It probably is quite different in the States but in my country, this is very true. If you are a lone individual fighting a legal case against a large organization, chances are you will be worn down by years of litigation that often appears endless. To dissuade litigants even further, cases are filed in far-off remote outposts that make such endeavors cost-prohibitive even further [1, for e.g.].

[1] http://www.livemint.com/Specials/13TE2UEtexMf1GDeEt5rCP/Mahe...

Add on top of this how easy it is to buy law enforcements here (including judges). It's like a very fair and open market. Whoever pays more gets the favour. That's exactly how he got that order passed in a district court (which is not even a high court - apex court of a state, let alone the Supreme Court - nation's apex court) by a judge who probably heard the word Internet for the sixth time in his entire life and the term "webpage" I am sure for the first time and was paid well for issuing the order.

Agreed. Are down modders anonymous? Seems unfair they can take 4x the points of a contributing comment.

"Why is this being modded down? It's the truth."

Since when has the truth been popular, or well received when it wasn't also what people wanted to hear?

Uber is sitting on billions of dollars of VC money. I'm sure that there are some very high-powered law firms out there salivating at the chance to represent these women in a class-action lawsuit.

Maybe the victims won't get as much recompense as they deserve (because so much of the judgement will go to attorneys), but I would not be so sure that Uber will have them outgunned in court. At the very least, it could teach Uber a lesson by putting an expensive crater in their VC runway.

I'm afraid you have a poor idea of what makes high-powered law firms salivate. When they see someone sitting on a pile of billions of dollars, they don't think "how can I piss that person and all his friends off?" They think "how can become that person's best buddy?"

Maybe so. But it arguably depends on firm type.

Costs and expenses (including experts) are typically only a few percent of recoveries. Unless recovery ended up being much smaller than expected, anyway. Fees over 20% require substantive justification.[0]

0) http://www.maglaw.com/publications/articles/00392/_res/id=At...

$3 billion is from the Saudi sovereign fund..

As others have pointed on, on top of all that, even if you win, you're going to have a very hard time getting a job in the same field because of the law suit.

At this scale of awfulness and given how much cash Uber has, I imagine some very good employment lawyers are going to be shaking the bushes looking for as many plaintiffs as they can find, and wouldn't think of charging them to participate.

agreed, watching "the good wife" has been uncomfortably educational about how the system works.

It's also a fantastic show, to boot.

A disappointing end though in my opinion

The good fight (which is like the sequel) is turning out to be quite good though!

I've never seen a movie or television show that portrayed something I knew well, where it was accurate.

Every time I thought I learned something from a movie or tv show it was because they were portraying something I didn't know a lot about. I would be very slow to say any kind of entertainment like this is educational.

Get Peter Thiel on your side. He used the courts to kill Gawker.

Thiel has called Uber the most ethically challenged company[1]. But I think he's a Lyft investor. So maybe that's why?

On the other hand they both seem to get along really well with the current US president.

[1] http://time.com/3593701/peter-thiel-uber/

Not just any huge corp, but Uber - getting away with shady stuff is in their DNA

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