DoorDash to pay $5m to settle class-action lawsuit over independent contractors
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The lawyer gets $1.25 million and the people supposedly impacted get $125 each. I don't what erudite Hacker News-worthy comment to make except... SMH.
I also think hacker news has no concept of what a large lawsuit like this costs.
if they spend 20 bucks a class member on everything from locating them to location to answering questions to handling claims, that's 50% of that 1.25 million right there. That doesn't include the actual billable hour cost of the lawsuit, which for large and complex lawsuits, is ridiculous.
At the same time, hilariously, people here are against class arbitration (which would pay lawyers dramatically less and claimants more), and pretty much every other solution. It appears they just think "lawyers should be paid less, but work harder to get others money". IE they want a system where there are class actions, and the companies are made to hurt, but nobody else other than the people in the class make money.
The truth is most of these claims are worthless entirely, and people don't deserve squat. So $125 is infinitely more than they should have gotten. (i'm sure someone will come along with no understanding of contract damages and claim the class members deserve billions)
Are some valuable? Sure. Do some serve a valuable purpose of deterrent? Again, sure.
But that's like 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 of all class action lawsuits right now.
Check out most class action lawfirm case lists, for example, and see how many you think are really deserving of more than nominal damages or "please fix this issue for us". Think about how many of them are the moral equivalent of bugs you've made in software before that is sold or used by other people. Do you think you should be paying millions?
Personally, I can't wait for the day when liability for software bugs comes and everyone here immediately changes their mind and decides most of these kinds of lawsuits are probably not worth as much as they thought :)
In the meantime, people starting worse-than-useless startups appear to be deserving of untold billions, and startups doing the same type of thing (eg making infinite multiples of their workers, who basically make squat) are a-okay.
BTW, fun fact: Class action lawyers, on average, work much worse hours than startup engineers.
...Then all the more reason the lawyers who helped them bring the suit in the first place don't deserve to be paid for empowering said fraud.
It's like arresting drug dealers instead of trying to get people to stop taking drugs in the first place.
Until you stop demand, ...
What does that tell us about the way our legal system works?
Government intervention? How would that work? Worse I can imagine all sorts of ways that it would be abused. Look at how much frivolous suits are in the system filed by those who don't to put any skin into the game
Can you quantify that?
So if you take an hour for lunch, go to the bathroom, take a coffee break, etc, none of that counts. Nor does commuting, hanging out on hacker news, reddit, waiting for compiles, reading legal updates or general correspondence.
2200 billable hours a year comes out to roughly:
With a half hour commute you are "working" from 7:30am to 8:30pm Monday-Friday And 9:30am-5:30pm three Saturdays a month
• With a one hour commute you are "working" from 7:00am to 9:00pm Monday-Friday And 9:00am to 6:00pm three Saturdays a month
Assuming you take one hour for lunch, one hour for dinner and 4 15 minute breaks, and bill all other time
2500 billable hours a years means you work another 300 billable hours, which comes out to working all sundays 10-5pm as well.
Engineers aren't anywhere near this productive in the hours they do work :)
Well. Class action lawyers only back a case when they know the cost of the settlement is cheaper for the defendant than the court costs. This way the defendant's side wont be heard. When confronted with actual court/litigation many of these scumbag class action attorneys flee like cockroaches.
Math:
(1,250,000 + 15,000) + (33,744 * 125) = 5,483,000
1,250,000 / 5,483,000 = 0.227977385
.05 * 5,483,000 = 274,150
(.95 * 5,483,000)/33,744 = 154.363739
5483000/33744 = 162.4881460407776
...A system lobbied for, and legislated by said lawyers.
We've privatized law enforcement. Your complaint is said private law enforcement needs to be paid, not just for the work she did on spec here, but also for the work that doesn't succeed or result in a payout.
The alternative to not paying private law enforcement is we get basically no law enforcement around labor codes if you make it not financially feasible for lawyers to take these cases.
Yes, and probably stop enriching anyone.
But again, i could argue literally the same thing about startups or anything else HN cares about, and it makes about as much sense (since you haven't said "why" this makes sense)
IE i could say: "if the only group of people meaningfully enriched are early startup employees, there is a problem we should be examining in the underlying system".
You act as if the problem is the lawyers here. Much like crappy startups, the lawyers are just doing what clients are quite literally paying them to do. The underlying problem is the people who think this is their ticket to money. Until you solve that cultural problem, you won't get anywhere. Without people trying to sue over everything and believing they are entitled to mondo bucks because their coffee maker failed one morning or whatever, you would have no problem whatsoever.
But right now we've built a system of private enforcement. That's ... what the lawyers do. and they take the cases likely to actually be good for business. If you want a different system, you'd also have to change the enforcement mechanism.
"...A system lobbied for, and legislated by said lawyers."
What? You realize there are lawyers lobbying on both sides of this, right?
They both spend and lobby about equal amounts, too. You see the same thing in criminal law as well.
What, you mean we might live without internet connectivity in my toaster, or the ability for a distant CEO to brick my garage door opener?!
As for lobbying, you're going to have to point me to the lawyers lobbying against trial law on an equal footing with the trial lawyers lobby; I wasn't aware that AAJ had any serious competition anymore than the NRA did.
For starters, the association of corporate counsel, the institute for legal reform (which is the US chamber of commerce's legal lobby arm), and the US chamber of commerce.
The ACC has 34k+ members, which is about as many as, for example, the national association of criminal defense attorneys.;
Hourly rates for top lawyers can be as high as $1250 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704071304576160...), and they can bill up to 2000 hours a year. So if they have 100% utilization they can clear $2,500,000.
Liss-Riordan is at the top of her game, and fighting the good fight. We should support her.
They also attached a list with the payouts for the other people on the suit and at the top of the list in the millions were the lawyers :/
Amazingly, people here seem to think it's a grievance that gets paid, not the execution of the idea. In America, grievances are more common than good ideas -- everybody has them. And in many cases, no matter how good the grievance, it takes real work to get the wronging party to pay any significant amount.
That's not to say the class action system can't be abused, but class actions aren't abusive by nature.
> ... the resolution they agreed on was not to change independent contractors to employee status, but rather change some policies to improve clarity and ensure more rights for the workers.
The article doesn't really give me a good idea of what the original lawsuit was about. It states that DoorDash was misclassifying "Dashers" as contractors, but other than the cash, the only thing they mention wrt the settlement is that DoorDash will change some of its deactivation policies, presumably because Dashers were being removed from the platform without clear reason.
So, is this a case where the class action accused DoorDash of misclassifying employees and then settled for a pile of cash, some minor policy tweaks, and no fundamental change in the company's contractor practices?
If I were upper management at DoorDash, I would be talking to the person that runs Customer Support to see if they (a) even recognize their CS setup is terrible (b) are doing something to fix the problem.
Context: https://twitter.com/zaatar/status/849968887491776513