Any lawyer willing to try to cut into these extraordinarily evil companies, I say give them the money. The lawyers are being compensated like SEC whistleblowers in a modern war against vast human rights violations, they're mercenaries in a conflict and should probably be compensated as such when they achieve big results.
He ended up making a low SDE2 salary averaged out over 10 years and had to put up significant cash and take big loans from his mentor to cover things.
His mentor had to give back most of the 1/2B settlement split 7 ways when the case was reversed around 7 years later.
This was a massive payday. But the firm put out millions on research / experts in cases over the years. It's very much VC Firm in many ways.
In his first 7 years my friend I think was in the hole $700k for the cases, which on average took 3.5 years. Most of the cases barely made any money or lost money. One of those cases paid off enough that he was able to pay off the loans and get to he made this average salary. I know it was very stressful. He also had a different relationship with debt than I did.
There is a vast gulf between 110 million dollars and not getting paid.
Even keeping in mind just how expensive a lawyer's time is, how would say, 10 million dollars not be enough of a jackpot for a lawyer to take on a case like this?
It really does seem like a truly arbitrary and overinflated amount for the lawyers to make out like this. I wonder how many of those 1.6M users would benefit from 50 dollars more than the lawyer will benefit from an extra 100 million.
And the rest of the settlement is still 540 million, so 5 times more than what the firms are making. If you divide the remaining 110 million between all the plaintiffs, it's an additional 68 dollars per plaintiff...and that leaves nothing left for the people that actually did the work.
It's the same bad argument that the McDonald's CEO makes 20 million dollars - but he can't pay staff 15$ minimum wage, even though that 20 million split up between the tens of thousands of employees is a one time payment of pocket change.
Lawyer is a synecdoche for the people actively working on the litigation side. Like when people say "I'm calling my lawyer" while referring to a firm with multiple names at the helm...
And the rest of your comment... did you actually read the comment? I said if you leave 10 million for the cost of litigation they got 50 dollars each.
See how there's numbers between 110 and 0?
-
50 dollars is not pocket change for the average person, maybe for people on HN since we work in tech, but I bet relative to the worth of the average person represented, 50 dollars is worth more than the bonuses about to land where the majority of the 100 million that would otherwise benefit them is going.
It's nothing like talking about the McDonalds CEO because the numbers involved are not pocket change if you apply critical thinking, 50 dollars from a one-time payout vs pocket change has very different dynamics for the recipient..
And also consider that it’s true that the users could benefit from 50 bucks more but at the same time they didn’t do anything to receive this settlement. If the lawyers didn’t put the work in, they would get zero.
I guess I just don’t understand why that number specifically is unreasonable. Regardless if a user doesn’t like it they should be able to opt out and pursue a better deal on their own.
If your friend came to you and said "I hired a guy to make the home page for my startup and got charged 1000 dollars an hour" would you say "well who's to decide the value of an hour it's arbitrary"?
After all, there are developers making more than the 2 million a year or so TC, and who are you to say how much effort was involved?
Think about if things pass a smell test, apply some lateral thinking...
No one here knows for sure what the litigation cost in terms of billable hours, but 110 million dollars is a lot of money! If the average pay of someone touching this case was $400 an hour, you're talking about man centuries of billable hours (mind you that 6 hours of billable hours out of an 8 hour day of work is not bad for a lawyer)
In reality the average pay is much lower since even if the lawyers were billing a thousand an hour, the people under them aren't anywhere near 400 an hour.
There is absolutely no reason why the court shouldn't attempt to find a market rate for their efforts and pay that... as I linked to start, it's been approached before
-
And on a meta note... all too often I see people go "well if you don't have every fact you must discard any attempt at reasoning about it, it's arbitrary"
Lateral thinking, extrapolation, just building an intuition, all valuable skills to work on.
Your first comment made a good point. Your other comments were needlessly condescending.
Instead people will nitpick those blanks to the nth degree and get bogged down in semantics like "well acthually a lawsuit takes more than 1 lawyer"
It's very annoying.
Or under the impression they do this?
Because if you follow the case info the lawyers based their compensation on a simple percentage from the get-go.
The negotiation from the judge to increase the payout was also based on percentage points.
This approach scales well for smaller cases. People who can't afford representation get it without trying to figure out billable hours.
But as I explain in my other comment, it's worth the courts asking if this scales in a sensible way to cases like this.
However, I do think the US is the only country that enforces laws by "trial by ambulance chasers". Too many ambulance chasers make good money bullying small companies, either through patent laws, minor violations of laws, etc.
So many things about our lives are dictated by precedents set by ridiculous law suits, we don't see it anymore. I went on a bicycle tour in Italy, and the owner was an American. We paid our money and took the bikes. I asked the owner if we had to fill out any release forms, and he said "You only have to do that stupid shit in the US. Here in Italy, we treat adults like adults." The realization of how intertwined our lives had become with the results of all these lawsuits shocked me. It is truly a slippery slope created by lawyers and we are now at the bottom of this slippery slope.
Of course, the excessive complexity of the legal system is one of the reasons why lawyers get compensated so lavishly. But maybe that should be disturbing, rather than someone else's fairly earned income?
If they win, you get $540 million, they get $110 million.
I would take that deal in a heartbeat.