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Comment by gretch | Hacker News Reader

Not a lawyer but I’ve been in lawsuits on all sides. It’s the general recommended practice.

The number can only go down, never up, so you ask for all that you can.

It does have -some- sense if you think about it: this is a young kid with a whole career ahead of him. Because of this accusation, his career is pretty much over. Since he could have been one of the best (as demonstrated by beating magnus) he would have made $100m over a lifetime. Based This is probably the order of magnitude that hikaru and magnus will make in their careers. Or some loose logic like that

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>The number can only go down, never up, so you ask for all that you can.

This is false. A jury can absolutely award more than what the plaintiff seeks, and the judge can increase it even more than what a jury awards.

I mean one of the most famous civil cases, the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, is an example of the jury awarding significantly more than what the plaintiff sought. For a recent example is the Alex Jones lawsuit where the plaintiff's sought a combined total of 300 million dollars but were awarded almost 1 billion dollars.

Those are extremely exceptional cases. What I gave is pragmatic advise for a normal person in general situations. But by all means, conduct your law suits however you want.

No, the fact that damages can change (and increase) over the course of a trial is not extremely exceptional at all, in fact it's the norm. The vast majority of civil suits are for unspecified claims.

I only mentioned McDonald's and Alex Jones because most people would be familiar with them, not because they are exceptional. OJ Simpson's wrongful death suit is another example where the damages significantly exceeded what the plaintiff claimed.

Your advice is neither pragmatic or actually advisable by the ABA either and in all honesty, it sounds like you're just making stuff up.

I am not a lawyer.

I've worked with multiple lawyers on multiple suits and this is literally how they advised me. I've been on the other side of the table where I received legal letters asking to repair harms, and this is a similar story.

I'm telling stories about my life experiences. If you choose not to believe them, whatever I don't care.

And obviously you should not take the advise of me, an internet stranger, over your personal counsel. But yeah, when you get a suit handed to you, don't be surprised if this is the way things play out. Probably in your analysis you forgot to factor in that the vaaaast majority of disputes never reach an actual trial or a jury and are settled out of court.

When discussing legal matters, please avoid making statements like this:

"What I gave is pragmatic advise for a normal person in general situations."

Avoid purporting to give people legal advice if you are not a subject matter expert.

If you want to discuss your own personal experiences, by all means you're welcome to do so and there's nothing wrong with that. In that case avoid making factual or categorical claims that could mislead people and certainly don't do so with the notion that you're giving people advice on the matter.

When you say something can never happen that's a factual legal claim that is false when in fact it happens all the time. Perhaps in your specific circumstances that was the correct course of action, but that does not mean that this is a legal principle that can be generalized and from which you can advise others on.

You're basically just stating a set of arbitrary life principles and then saying everyone should live by them.

I thought my comment was 1) definitely ethical based on the fact the first sentence stated I'm not a lawyer, then later stating that you should always take the advise of your personal lawyer and 2) added value to ppl who didn't have any legal experience at all on the topic.

You think I was using the word "never" literally? Okay well how about you just said "in fact it happens all the time". Okay so it happens 100% of the time right? Does it even happen 50% of the time? You're a hypocrite for criticizing the use of conversational shortcuts and then using them yourself.

You've failed to convince me of anything, and I'm going to keep living my life and making comments the way I was.

> Because of this accusation, his career is pretty much over.

That was the conventional wisdom 3 weeks ago, when chess.com unleashed their report and things looked pretty bad for Hans.

But he performed respectably at the US championship over the past ~2 weeks (4 wins, 3 losses, 6 draws). He was entertainingly arrogant in interviews (I consider this a plus) and seemed to spontaneously conjure chaos (see the king decapitation near the end of the US championship).

If he continues like this (and if security measures are improved), he will be one of the (let's say) top-25 players and also one of the most entertaining.

I don't think we can pronounce the fate of his career yet. He's also only 19 years old.

In chess, a lot of tournaments are invite-only and he reports his invite was already dropped from Tata Steel and other high-profile tournaments. Without playing them he is stuck at open tournaments like US Chess Championship.

Magnus made clear that tournament organizers will need to choose between him or Hans. What's the point of choosing Hans?

At high level Chess, Hans career is all but over

Id feel a lot worse for this kid if he hadn’t admitted to cheating before.

Yeah seriously. AFAIK all Carlsen said was "I believe he cheated more - and more recently - than he admitted"

He implied way more though :/ is that enough to justify a court case, no idea, but that's way more than enough to break his whole career.

> The number can only go down, never up, so you ask for all that you can.

I've heard the same logic applied to Patent claims, though I also understand that there is also a countervailing force, where it's against your interest to make too many claims.

His chess career. He most certainly has a wealth of other opportunities, and I tend to think of these chess grandmaster types as very capable of being very good at a lot of other things.

Man, I really hope nobody treated Brittney Griner like that when she came home...

"Hey, I know you're an Olympic athelete who has been unfairly persecuted for overblown doping allegations, but... have you ever considered a career in journalism?"

Yeah... In that example though it's a basketball player caught with vape pens in her luggage, not olympic doping. The big difference is that she's not harmed her reputation with her behavior, like Hans has (or she would have were it Olympic doping). For better or worse, we care about how people represent themselves, and at least in the US vape pens don't impact your reputation like allegations of cheating do.

Griner is accused of some drug offenses, but AFAIK not doping. She's not accused of cheating in her sport.

In either case, she may well be too old to continue playing competitively when she comes back. But both she and Hans might still find careers in the sport as coaches. By all accounts Hans is an excellent player, even if he's cheated, and a former cheat could still find modest work as a coach.

This would be more like _if_ she had admitted to doping during Junior Worlds, then wondered why nobody had confidence in her performance in the Olympics.

FYI, she's still in prison: https://people.com/sports/brittney-griner-releases-statement...

Chess is most of these peoples lives. Hans has talked about how basically all he does is study chess, play chess, and eat take out food. He doesn't really have any non chess basked skills.

That's great, but if for some reason I would lose the ability to make a living through my usual means then nobody would defend me. All I would get is "get your ass and go work [in McD/whatever]".

It is similar to the physical sports - after your career is ended (especially if abruptly from an injury) you just go and work like everyone else.

This depends on the exact circumstances of how your career was ended.

If you were a rising star athlete and someone broke your legs, you'd have no problem finding a lawyer to represent you.

An injury is an accident, very different from something someone caused on purpose.

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