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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> I shot an email back explaining AGAIN that this car had been paid for in full already and that we have been very dissatisfied by how Tesla had been handling this situation.

Emailing that you are "very dissatisfied", after they locked you out of your very expensive car, erroneously and illegally repossessed your car in front of your boss, yelled at your father, and dug in their heels?

Careful, your path of unhinged aggression might someday escalate as far as a sternly-worded letter!

> we have been talking about getting an attorney or at least taking this to small claims court

Attorney.

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>Attorney

“That’ll be $4500 up front for me to even look at this, billed $300/hour against that. Of which I will take 4 hours to “review your case” and another 2 hours to write a letter. Oh, you have no damages besides time/embarrassment? I won’t say that your chance of getting anything is basically 0%, at least not until I’ve spent all of that retainer deposit. Oh, you want to take them to court? That’ll be another $20k deposit please.”

Too true. Unfortunately it's the "therapy" of easy suggestions for consumer troubles.

(And your great example doesn't even take into account that e.g. the letter they wrote is literally a free download they got from somebody's blog, and they left the example template's case details intact...)

Exactly, it’s such a mess. I feel like most of the “lawyer up!” commenters have never actually lawyered up.

Never take legal advice from the opposing party (or some random internet commenter for that matter)

Pricing is between you and the attorney, and some will go on contingency for it

That wasn’t legal advice, it was “this is probably how this will go”, advice I sure wish some “random internet commenter” had given me before my last run through the legal system.

Also, given the facts of the case as presented good effing luck getting a lawyer to “take it on contingency”. They only do that in the states if there’s potential for a six-figure payout

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