Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is for informational and entertainment purposes only

Everyone seems to be conflating the California AG requests with Amazons.

I parsed more closely about what the ask here is, and its that Amazon is asking via separate motions for the same information given to the AG case which, due to how discovery works, they should already have, this to me reads as an attempt to press Molson legally and thus spend time and money on complying with these requests.

They're also asking for additional information above what the CA AG office asked for or may have considered immaterial to their case. Its a fishing exercise to see if they can find anything to discredit Molson as a witness.

Due to the wording in the thread, I found it confusing, but I read some of the posted pics of the asks, and its clear that Amazon is not only re-asking for what the CA AG office asked for, but also additional information. The wording makes it seem like only the AG office is asking for information.

EDIT: Also, i see some folks think this is a situation where someone is being sued. Nowhere does it say Molson is being sued, Molson is essentially alleging that this is an overreach of discovery[0] via being "buried" by it. Molson has apparently confused a subpoena with a lawsuit however

EDIT 2: I think Molson is conflating a few things (such as lawsuit vs subpoena) and I can't say I blame anyone, the legal system is complex and it can be really hard to remember these things under pressure. Its important to look at the posted documents more than anything, Molson was subpoenaed to provide discovery and I think Molson may have conflated that with a "lawsuit"

EDIT 3: Given this is Twitter, he may have meant something like being served in a lawsuit or meant subpoena and not lawsuit without realizing and can't edit the tweets. I still think we can give Molson the benefit of the doubt here

[0]: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/code-of-civil-procedure/ccp-sec...

Molson says right in one of his tweets that he’s been “served with a lawsuit.” As far as I can tell, he hasn’t. He’s been served with a subpoena. Amazon has a right to subpoena evidence from third parties, and they have a right to extend their requests for evidence beyond just what has already been given to the CA AG. They have the right to look for exculpatory evidence, even if it’s more than what’s already been given by Molson. “I don’t have those documents” is an acceptable response to a subpoena, so it’s not like he has to come up with stuff he doesn’t already have. Amazon or the CA AG already having the evidence isn’t a reason to stop them from asking Molson for it.

Molson also has rights. The discovery process isn’t supposed to be used to overwhelm or harass third parties, so he should move to quash if he really is being overwhelmed. This is the reality of our system: if you’re a witness and you’ve got evidence relevant to a case then the parties (and the court) have the right to get it from you. This is especially true when someone is already involved as a witness for one side, as here. Unfortunately, being able to be roped into a lawsuit that you’re not a party to is not only possible but probable in the USA.

Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

I agree, see my note about giving Molson some room here given I imagine the stresses of this ongoing situation Molson's involved in and likely doesn't have the legal vocabulary to back anything. Whats actually telling here is the motions Molson posted pictures of in the thread, that says everything that's actually happening here. I'm not going to fault someone under stress and likely has a limited understanding of the legal system for getting the wording wrong here, I imagine it feels like a lawsuit, but yes, its actually a subpoena.

If hypothetically I was Molson I'd be rushing to hand this all over to the state AG and get resources from them for assistance, if at all possible.

It's also a tweet, so even if he wrote "lawsuit" and wanted to correct it to "subpoena" (or other legal request), would not be possible to do so.

It's interesting later on in his thread where it's clear he's not a particular critic of Amazon overall, merely this specific policy; they're turning him into an enemy either intentionally or unintentionally.

He also could have meant served in a lawsuit, which is colloquially sometimes how people refer to being subpoenaed

Does this mean you can go broke merely from being a witness? Or does Amazon have to reimburse him for his costs and time?

They don't reimburse jurors at a reasonable rate, why would witnesses be treated any better?

It's much easier to either get out of jury duty than a subpoena, or to fulfill jury duty than a subpoena.

Also, witnesses testifying pretty much have to be voluntary. Consider being a witness to a mafia murder, and being afraid for your life. Do you think the system should be able to force you to that?

Ok, I've switched the title to say subpoenaed. If there's a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.

> “I don’t have those documents” is an acceptable response to a subpoena, so it’s not like he has to come up with stuff he doesn’t already have.

Speaking from experience, better be sure you word that response right, or you might accidentally give them reason to push harder/further. You need a lawyer to fight against good lawyers.

> Molson also has rights. The discovery process isn’t supposed to be used to overwhelm or harass third parties, so he should move to quash if he really is being overwhelmed

While you're right, the process of even doing this will cost you a minimum of $10k USD if you're in a wealthy area in the coastal US. Which for a corporation is nothing, you likely have in-house counsel you're already paying for that can do this legal boilerplate.

But as an individual it's terrifying and incredibly stressful.

> While you're right, the process of even doing this will cost you a minimum of $10k USD if you're in a wealthy area in the coastal US.

$1,645 in 2007 in Los Angeles, for N=1.

Business partners had a nasty fallout and one subpoenaed me, a contractor who had billed them only $1,000.

> Molson says right in one of his tweets that he’s been “served with a lawsuit.”

Do you have a reference to that tweet? Was it removed, or am I just having a hard time finding it?

"And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit."

https://twitter.com/Molson_Hart/status/1663582603906088961

> NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This is for informational and entertainment purposes only

Asking because I don't know - I see this a lot, but is it necessary? Surely we don't live in a time where a commenter on a news site is liable for their opinion, right?

Almost certainly not, but adding a one line disclaimer costs nothing and covers that one in a billion chance it turns into a headache.

IANAL (ya see what I did there?), but probably not necessary as a legal requirement. I always viewed it as “juuust in case that you think I’m a lawyer offering legal advice because I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about, I am neither a lawyer, nor do I know what I’m talking about” courtesy to the reader.

I cannot imagine getting pulled into court because I recommended someone file in small claims court for $PROBLEM, and didn’t put “IANAL”.

There's another a step above: I am a lawyer but I am not your lawyer.

No. Lawyers sometimes call out that they are not offering legal advice and/or that the reader is not to consider themselves the lawyer's client, out of what is, in most contexts (I'm pretty sure) excessive caution to prevent liability and stay within ethical bounds (but then, IANAL). But AFAIK (IANAL!) there's no remotely-realistic risk to someone who's not a lawyer, and has not represented themselves as a lawyer, posting opinions about the law in a context in which nobody with two brain cells to rub together might for some reason believe they're a lawyer without their saying so (i.e. this isn't LawyerNewsOnlyForLawyersAllOurUsersAreLawyers.com), without such a disclaimer.

As far as I can tell, this is the result of people reading lawyers announcing that they are lawyers and posting such a disclaimer, and other posters specifying "I am not a lawyer" purely out of consideration for the reader, not out of legal obligation, and getting the two all mixed up together, while deciding that both are necessary (I'm quite sure one is not, and I'm pretty sure the other one isn't exactly necessary, either).

Consider how many published pieces and TV news programs feature people who are and are not lawyers, providing opinions about the law, typically with none of these disclaimers. It's evidently not a problem. I think lawyers only bother to do it in forums because there's some remote chance that someone might be able to argue they were mislead by the conversational and two-sided nature of the medium into thinking the lawyer had taken them as a client or was offering advice in an official capacity (I'm skeptical such a case would get very far, in any event, though).

There are specific issues around giving legal advice as a non-lawyer which could come up. There are also areas (securities law) where something could be construed as investment advice and even a non professional giving that advice is exposed to Consequences for doing so.

(Also it is fun to add “for external use only” etc disclaimers.)

I always thought it's to prevent people from taking any advice and actually acting on it in a legal case they're involved in(as in IANAL so don't actually use my advice in a court case since it may be complete BS).

Potential legal issues aside, I also give disclaimers like "I am not an entomologist" as a way of introducing myself as a fellow interested amateur and leaving room for an actual entomologist to come in and contradict me.

IANAL but no. I sometimes add it to remind people that if they want real legal advise they should contact a lawyer and to avoid sounding too authoritative.

> I parsed more closely about what the ask here is, and its that Amazon is asking via separate motions for the same information given to the AG case which, due to how discovery works, they should already have, this to me reads as an attempt to press Molson legally and thus spend time and money on complying with these requests.

Can't his lawyer go to the judge and have this stopped?

Note: I am not a lawyer in California and the is definitely not legal advice

A lawyer for Molson could conceivably file a Motion to Quash the Subpoena, however, he has to argue from what are generally a small range of options to deny or limit the scope of the subpoena. The most common is that the request is unduly broad and thereby is burdensome. This would usually not result in granting the quash, but could secure tightening of the scope of the subpoena. I don't know enough to even guess at the likelihood of limiting the subpoena, but the general assumption in litigation is that at least some portion of a facially relevant subpoena will be granted.

I followed up with OP on Twitter, and apparently he's pro se.

https://twitter.com/dpifke/status/1663665211914481667

Amazon filed to quash his deposition subpoena, but that was apparently because they felt that it was premature without more document production. But from the picture of the order he posted, it looks like the judge has already limited the overall scope.

A decent lawyer costs $400+ per hour. 1-2 hours for initial consult, 3-4 hours to prepare the motion and another 3-4 hours to appear before a judge. Other side delays for another hearing and add another 3-4 hours … could cost $5000+

The system is working exactly as designed.

I assume you are being sarcastic.

20 hours at $400/hour is $8k. For a business with five employees, long-term leases, etc., that's painful, but shouldn't bankrupt you.

It also really should be covered by insurance, but in my experience you want your own counsel separate from your insurer's anyways, and specialty legal insurance isn't worth the paper on which the policy is printed. Far cheaper to just apply for a business credit card (or keep the balance on your existing one low enough to cover sudden unexpected expenses like these).

He should just respond in kind and use ChatGPT to generate terrabytes of discovery documents for Amazon lawyers to go through. Overreach for overreach.

What’s the catch with this approach

They could ask the court to block the requests(I presume), if there is demonstrably an excess or errant type of requests, and the court(the judge) will remeber that.

When producing documents you're asserting they're actually real.

So if ChatGPT generates a bunch of stuff that is incriminating, you'll have some 'splaining to do. And potentially contempt of court of the like.

"Restate the following boring document in blandest possible ways, do it 1,000,000 times"

I wonder how many times it would take to have decent odds of producing a variant with ‘Amazon is innocent, it’s all a giant frame job I’m doing to them’ or similar in it.

I guess adding some post-processing classifier to check generated docs for self-incrimination would lower the odds by 2-3 magnitudes.

What’s the saying? ‘You can’t build in quality with better QA’?

Haha. You do you, I just can’t imagine any lawyer saying what you’re proposing is a good idea at all.

I mean we need to figure out an admissible way to bankrupt Amazon lawyers like they want to bankrupt us. Tit-for-tat.

Ah, but the key thing you’re missing is that the Amazon lawyers are probably being paid by the hour (at very high rates) and would love to have an excuse to pretend to work for longer.

And you’ll never succeed in bankrupting Amazon.

That's still putting a lot of trust into the AI that it's not going to overstep in some way that's problematic to you, and given the lawyers that have to sift through the content you create may not be very happy about it, they might be more than willing to jump on any excuse to cause you problems based on what you submitted.

As an example, just search about ChatGPT being "confidently wrong" or "confidently incorrect". It's also possible that in restating things ChatGPT may be "colloquially accurate" but "legally incorrect" in how it restates things, given it's trained on many sources of natural language, and I think most people would choose to communicate with a court and lawyers (especially ones they assume antagonistic) with a higher level of caution than colloquialisms as they would when speaking informally to others.

Not clear what the specifics of the order here is, but the catch is he could risk being found in contempt of court or guilty of obstruction of justice depending on the circumstances. A subpoena is a court order compelling either testimony or the production of evidence. If you then go and make up a bunch of new stuff for the purposes of frustrating that court order you could find yourself in some difficulties.

That said, there is such a thing as "malicious compliance" ie complying with an subpoena by supplying the evidence requested in as unhelpful a format as possible. One that I heard of is in a suit related to the Madoff case, Madoff was compelled to produce records of phone calls made from his company and personal phones, so provided thousands of pages of very blurry scanned image pdfs in order to make it difficult for prosecutors (and the trustees, who were working to recover the funds) to OCR them and decipher who he had called. In the end they managed to do this nontheless.

Jail for contempt tends to keep me on the straight and narrow but the again I’m trying to retain my license which may influence my thinking.

If there isn't a lawsuit or a criminal case, how is there discovery?

There's a civil lawsuit involving the State of California and Amazon. When you have a civil case, you can get discovery from third parties using subpoenas, which seems to be what's happening here.

I think the point being made is that the lawsuit or criminal case is not against him, even if he seems to be tangled up in a case to some degree.

NOTE: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Whats happening here is Molson a expert witness to a lawsuit filed against Amazon by the CA Attorney General Office. They've issued a subpoena for information (as is their right under the legal system) for additional discovery. A good chunk of it appears to be a repeat of the same discovery the state AG office is or has gathered, but they're also looking for anything related even tangentially to Molson's relationship with Amazon (emails, messages etc) as well. The allegation here would more closely be that Amazon is trying to abuse the discovery process by overreach.

I'm willing to give Molson the benefit of the doubt in saying "lawsuit" when likely its subpoena. I imagine this is a stressful time for Molson and it can be hard to get the nuances of the legal system portrayed right. The docs he posted make it all much more clear

As a lawyer, none of those requests are overreach. It would be malpractice to not make them.

I'm not a lawyer and would never give legal advice.

I'm not making judgement as to what is or isn't, simply am trying to clarify what he's getting at. I imagine to Molson this feels like Amazon is trying to bury them in discovery

You're not clarifying. You're speculating.

Now you are speculating. The poster could be the same person who made the tweets

Part of the complaint being made by Molsen is that even after two days of deposition, he's being asked to return for more, for is critique in a blog post. Is that considered normal in a case like this? If it is normal, are there some protections to keep a witness from continuously being deposed to the point that it is abuse, or is that something that one side would take up with the judge?

I'm not a lawyer, but i've been an expert witness in a few cases. Usually if you're coming back it's because they felt something was left out or they found new information elsewhere and want to ask questions around it. Usually though a second run is all about breaking you down as a witness.

I've had one time where I was called back in, it was related to new discovery that had been provided related to a security breach. It was from a third party and I had not been privy to the documents up to that point. Ultimately they had little or no bearing on the case but I did have to state I have no knowledge for a bunch of questions asked.

I think for OPs case, they're trying to find more gotchas. I would request through a lawyer to limit scope and or mitigate being harassed.

Who knows though, the amount of screwy games that lawyers play blew my mind.. until i remembered they bill hourly.

Your comment about billing hourly is extremely well taken. You’re not wrong to conclude that the billing model can contribute to overactive lawyering.

We are also trying to win (within reason) and we are often trying not to get sued or disbarred. (I guess I can’t speak for all of us, but…)

Sometimes the bills suck because of the billing model. Often the bills suck for a combination of those other reasons.

I also have noticed no one tends to shop around for the absolute least expensive lawyer for some reason. I’ll have to think more about that one…

I was probably over broad in my comment. Most of the lawyers I work with are actually reasonable and trying to solve the issue as you're implying. It's generally the larger cases / boutique firms that are pressing the numbers.

What a lot of people don't realize is that on class actions where laywers are often times lumped into one big case, most of them make peanuts if they're not the primary firms. You guys have a lot of gamble to with billing depending on your structure. So all in, I get it.

Yeah man, it’s a tough racket. Some lawyers are paid entirely on contingency. Personally I think the economics of this gig are ridiculous but I certainly don’t have a better model.

As a non-lawyer, at what point does that become abuse?

How much of my time do I have to burn for free because someone else is suing someone else, and my name came up?

It’s a lot. “Extraordinary efforts” or something like that is the test before an undue burden is met.

But like all good legal answers, the specific answer is that “it depends.”

You're saying that if a company is sued, it is legal malpractice to not target opposing witnesses with individual lawsuits?

Except for the fact that opposing witnesses are not being targeted with individual lawsuits.

Am I misunderstanding the thread?

> the state of California filed a complaint against Amazon. They cited me and made me a witness.

> And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit.

He’s misunderstanding, not you.

There's no actual evidence in this thread of Molson being served with an individual lawsuit. He appears to be subpoenaed and deposed in his capacity as a CA AG witness. Nowhere is he being sued by Amazon.

If by he you mean Molson, then you're right. He's an expert witness in the suite brought by CA against Amazon. There is no individual suite against him.

so since he's an expert witness for CA AG, can he request any kind of financial help/reimbursement from them?

Expert Witnesses are often paid eye watering sums of money

One of my professors was an expert witness on cases related to CPU cache design IP. He got paid $1000/hr. He said the opposing side would pick through every past resume he had looking for anything incorrect, and would interview his former co-workers and even neighbors I think looking for dirt on him.

Since Amazon is making the request, they pay:

Rule 26(b)(4)(E) Payment. Unless manifest injustice would result, the court must require that the party seeking discovery:

(i) pay the expert a reasonable fee for time spent in responding to discovery

Care to elaborate?

It's difficult to put any weight in an anonymous comment when it relies solely on credibility.

Generally in discovery a party is permitted to request anything ["reasonably calcu^H^H^H^H^H^H^H] "any nonprivileged matter that is relevant to any party’s claim or defense and proportional to the needs of the case."

So aything relevant to CA's claims against Amazon, or Amazon's defenses, is fair game. If your client is being sued for a Zillion dollars, and you don't dig up every possible way to discredit the plaintiff's key witnesses, you're not doing your job. This means asking about every possible connection between the plaintiff and the witness, their possible biases and gaps in credibility.

I like reading his tweets so I'm inclined to be generous, but just to be clear –he's the Chairman of an IP Enforcement firm [0], so the difference between a subpoena and a lawsuit should be elementary for him.

[0] https://www.edisonlf.com/about

Ouch. That looks really bad, either for the competence of the firm, or his intentions to make the situation more malicious than it actually were.

(When I was looking at his original tweet, when I saw "4 years" I immediately googled for California statute of limitations...)

they're also looking for anything related even tangentially to Molson's relationship with Amazon (emails, messages etc)

But Amazon should already have that information, seeing as it was party to that relationship? Can't he just answer with "go search your own archives" (or legalese to the same effect) for those things?

Not a lawyer. I imagine there's various forms of discovery and various ways it comes up. But one thing to note is that you can be victim of the pains of discovery as an innocent third party.

"Hey random vendor, backed by the full force of the Court, you are compelled to spend time and money getting us x,y,z and/or lawyer time arguing about it."

“The public has a right to every man’s evidence.”

If a party tries to abuse the discovery process against a third party then the third party can move for sanctions, including costs.

I don't follow. Aren't we saying the same thing?

Yes, there's definitely remedies if things go too far. Good luck with those, though. But the point is that you don't have to be the plaintiff or the respondent to get tied up in an expensive, time-consuming process.

I misread your post. I’ve deleted that sentence.

Unfortunately judges want evidence submitted so unless it is an impossible request, they usually allow it.

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