Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

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The law firm was notified ahead of time, twice. Lawyers expect others to abide by such notifications, do they not? They act like this was a crime against humanity, when they were told ahead of time that they were not allowed in their venues during the ongoing litigation.

Does the law firm have 100,000 employees? According to their website, they have about 29 attorneys in the firm. Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant. And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on. The secrecy and policies those companies put in place likely go well beyond simply not letting a lawyer part of a law firm that is suing one of your businesses into your building.

Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.

Lawyers play these little games all the time. I'm not necessarily for the policy or the use of facial recognition to enact it, but they were told ahead of time. They should know better. If they wanted to argue the points ahead of time and get approval, they could and should have.

> The law firm was notified ahead of time, twice.

How is that relevant? A stupid and harmful policy is stupid and harmful, regardless of who was notified and how. If I send an email to Google to notify my displeasure, it is not reasonable to expect all Google employees to be aware of it and avoid my business.

Despite the fact that personally punishing individual employees for a beef your holding company has with some of their colleagues is stupid. There is no other way of putting it.

> Lawyers expect others to abide by such notifications, do they not?

There is so much wrong here. Lawyers are not omniscient. They also expect companies to abide by their own terms of use, and routinely ignore unfounded or groundless “notifications”.

> Bringing up companies the size of cities compared to that is completely ridiculous and irrelevant.

So, where’s the limit? What company size makes this reasonable?

> And companies like Meta, Google, Apple, etc. will absolutely enact draconian policies when IP and other litigations are going on.

So, it is draconian after all. Show an example of individuals being booted off Google’s or Apple’s platforms only because of their employer.

> Why does it matter where she's licensed? It's irrelevant.

But then, none of the points you’ve made are, either.

Yea, I am with you on this one.

I started out reading the article wondering 'OMG, what is it that this mom could've possible done that she's banned?' and then when it says "lawyer at adversarial law firm" I immediately switched to "oh yea, makes total sense".

None of the counterarguments here stand up to scrutiny.

"Isn't involved in litigation" and "not a Security threat" - she is totally a security threat: today she's a mother of a girl scout and is not working on the case, and tomorrow she's a loyal employee helping out with the case.

"Part of girl scouts trip" - Does she have a firewall in her brain between personal and professional?

'Conlon said she thought a recent judge’s order in one of those cases made it clear that ticketholders like her “may not be denied entry to any shows.” - You know what the best thing about America is? Our endless appeal system.

This entire article is a non-story (someone denied access to a business), and yet, it's somehow making the rounds. The paranoid cynic part of my brain is interpreting this entire situation as "A law firm that sent in an employee for some snooping, and then got caught, and now is making some noise in the papers." The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

What she's alleging seems to be: the MSG conglomerate is using their large footprint to punish law firm employees unrelated to their dispute using venues also unrelated to their dispute. Doing it out of spite sounds possibly legal, if petty. But the other possible intention would be to try to dissuade law firms from taking a case against any MSG property, to try to deny legal representation to the plaintiff. Not a lawyer, but surely there's a law against that?

"Unrelated to their dispute" is a fuzzy category. How would the venue actually know that she's unrelated to the dispute? They're not going to have access to the internal management chart of the law firm in order to be able to precisely delineate in every case exactly who gets admitted and who doesn't. And it's unreasonable to force them to create some sort of bouncer appeals board to let people present evidence to show that their position at the law firm is unrelated to the dispute.

Remember everyone arguing that Twitter pre-Musk is a private company, so they could ban anyone they wanted? This is the same thing, only in a physical location.

> How would the venue actually know that she's unrelated to the dispute? They're not going to have access to the internal management chart of the law firm in order to be able to precisely delineate in every case exactly who gets admitted and who doesn't.

The venue knows not, but that venue is a tiny cog in an empire owned by the parent group.

The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.

With large and potential trans national groups doing this it has a parallel with, for example, one country banning an entire countries citizens from entry or doing business .. on the basis that a small group of citizens took action that was undesired.

Very large companies have very large numbers of employees and many different activities on the go.

Should, for example, several thousand people be banned from watching streaming television because 15 people in the company they are associated with are involved in a class action against a media group?

> The parent group compiled the ban list by trawling the large law firms website for images .. and the parent group knows which offices and groups of personnel are involved in a specific case.

Do they? I don't work in law but at every company I've worked we adjust who is working on what based on needs at the time. Why wouldn't a law office temporarily shift more people to a case if they needed some extra manpower?

>Very large companies have very large numbers of employees and many different activities on the go.

Someone else posted that the law firm has 29 members, not "very large numbers of employees".

Assuming that whether or not the lawyer is working on their case is the deciding factor, the venue (actually the conglomerate that owns them) are the ones who chose to come up with this retaliatory scheme so the onus is on them.

Calling not being able to be a consumer of the company their firm is suing punishment seems to be a bit of a stretch. And it's only during the duration of the lawsuit.

And again, why are the lawyers so surprised when they knew ahead of time? If they had asked, it could have even been pre-approved, and thus a non-story. If anything, I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm because they knew ahead of time and took their Girl Scout troop anyway, knowing it could look bad for MSG.

> Calling not being able to be a consumer of the company their firm is suing punishment seems to be a bit of a stretch. And it's only during the duration of the lawsuit.

What if the company was Google? What if it was a healthcare provider with a patented/proprietary treatment?

As a matter of fact, didn't we recently have articles in hn where people were commenting they are reluctant to charge back to Google because they don't want to risk losing their gmail and the rest of it?

> I'd almost consider this to have been an intentional act by the law firm

Good for them. The legal system is the only way corporations can be effectively held accountable. You can hate lawyers as much as you want but this is directed at us via proxy. Lawyers litigate for clients.

"Sorry we can't take your case. We use Google products extensively."

For whatever reason, I’m just not seeing it. Everyone keeps bringing up Google. Why? They are in a completely different industry and largely irrelevant from what I can see. And like I said, those companies will absolutely shut stuff down during IP litigations. When I was at a company being sued and vice versa for IP infringement, the entire company was told not to use the other company’s software products, and if you absolutely had to, then you needed to apply for specific one-off permission. That happens all the time, and it’s practically the same thing.

The law firm is a personal injury firm, which in my experience and understanding can be (not always) very shady. Why is it required that MSG let lawyers suing them come into their venues while being sued? One could argue that the policy should be targeted towards certain venues and lawyers, but that is a lot of overhead that is solved by a simple, blanket policy.

I honestly don’t see the outrage here. Sure, there are a lot of what ifs that make this seem worse, but those hypotheticals are not what seemed to happen here.

And it’s the law firm showcasing punitive action. They’re now suing MSG for the denial for something that basically seems like a stretch of a loophole. I almost would guarantee the law firm did this on purpose, and that’s why I can’t stand lawyers. They don’t play by the rules everyone else has to, and they get to make the rules.

> For whatever reason, I’m just not seeing it.

This is not a black and white issue, and there are valid points that can be made pro or con of either side. Even the likely possibility (I agree with you on that) that this was all planned does not change this. This fuzziness of the line that would obviously delineate right vs wrong is the issue.

That is why I added that "proxy" bit in there. One could argue for the position of law firms or the position of corporations, and I am urging you to now consider it from the pov of lonesome you, the possibly innocent bystander, caught between these two powerful social forces. You may still reach the same conclusion but it is a distinct analysis and you should do it if you haven't already.

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