Ask HN: Who has settled disputes in court, and won economically? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who has settled disputes in court, and won economically?

This means your legal fees and opportunity costs were outweighed by a reasonable person's valuation of what you gained.

I feel like the answers to this will be heavily skewed by the jurisdiction you live under.

Here in the UK, I had an airline hold a substantial amount of my money hostage and they refused to engage in a discussion to allow me to get my money back. I spent ~30mins filling out a small claims court application, paid the obligatory £115 fee, and a few weeks later the airlines lawyers contacted me offering me my money back along with a decent amount of compensation.

Equally, I've witnessed people pursue employment tribunal claims against their employer here in the UK, only for the process to take years, the preparatory effort being enormous, and the outcome being a positive judgement in their favour along with an insultingly meagre financial award. For some, that's still worth it purely for the vindication and validation.

So how much was it?

The courts rarely help. I've consulted lawyers about multiple issues over the years and gotten consultations. Each time the answer was the same - yes, this was an obvious violation of your rights and/or law, but there's not much of a case since the damages weren't severe and the system doesn't care about ADA or civil rights violations unless there was some severe injury. And yet I've seen frivolous suits with no basis make it in front of a judge.

I’ve done small claim court a few times and won. The cases were mostly rent related.

Can you be more specific?

My first and second case were related. My first case was my landlord withheld my security deposit when I was in college after junior year. I really needed the money so I threatened to sue (my college had legal help). He relented but decided to deduct BS charges. I went to the small claim court and filed everything properly with pictures and documentations. I think I paid the sheriff $25 to serve the paper. My landlord never showed up, won by default and got all my money back. If I remember correctly, I got my filing/serving fee back as well.

Here comes the second case. So I won, yay! He still refused to pay, so I went back to court again. This part was a bit hazy as I had the help of a law student at that time. If I remember correctly, I had to provide information to the court enforcement officer (a local sheriff) where to execute the collection. Since I knew my landlord's bank and workplace, it was easy. He had 2 options: property/asset seizure or wage garnish. He paid up immediately after the sheriff went to his work. I'm pretty sure I got all my money back including the fee the sheriff charges (I vaguely remember they get x percentage of the claim and gas miles?).

My third case was for eviction from my parents' old house. The renter didn't pay rent and got evicted. Broke many things on the way out. I knew small claim court limit was $5K, and it barely covered the cost of repair. But filing lawsuit in civil court was too big for me to handle and lawyers weren't really interested in that. Anyway, same process as before, carefully document everything. Won the case easily. Sheriff garnished his wage. I only got about $1K before he skipped town. Not that I care about it anymore, but the judgement is still out there against him.

To be clear, each case took forever. 60-90 days. Be patient, get what's rightly yours. In some ways, I have a lot of respect for our court system because of my experience. It's a hard job, but play by the rules and you probably will come out on top.

The security deposits are interesting. It would seem, if you had to use the legal system to merely get what you were owed, it was a net negative economically, right?

The eviction "barely covered the cost of repair" so it was also nonetheless a net negative.

It's tough. You are answering the question. I don't know anyone who has had a net positive economic outcome from the courts.

> if you had to use the legal system to merely get what you were owed, it was a net negative economically, right?

It depends how you anchor things. If you anchor to the amount you expected to recover assuming a hypothetical alternate reality where the landlord returns the amount of bond money you are lawfully owed, then it may feel as a net negative.

If you reframe the situation conditioned on observing the realised reality -- featuring a landlord who is not behaving as they are "ought" to, but are actually deducting BS charges, a more useful anchor would be to compare against the benchmark of "how much could you reasonably expect to recover, given the actual reality we're observed to be in, by the next best alternative to using the legal system".

One simple alternative to the legal system is to do nothing and let it go, resulting in recovery of 0% of the disputed value. Another alternative could be engaging a collection agency, who might be willing to buy the debt at a significant mark down from face value, in exchange for accepting the risk that they may not be able to collect. Yet another alternative could be a DIY approach where you get a bunch of mates with baseball bats to advocate on your behalf.

Recovering 20% of a debt net legal expenses through the legal system is a huge improvement over recovering 0% of a debt if the alternative is doing nothing and accepting 0% recovery.

I think your view is a bit odd in a sense that, average people don't go to court to gain or create economically values. Ignoring the headline ambulance chasing case here, there usually is an injured party to a transaction. In my case, if I didn't go to court, then I wouldn't have gotten anything back, so that's a negative economical outcome to me.

In theory, I should get my security deposit back promptly and tenants should pay rent on time. But in reality, that's just not the case. Court is the only mechanism that we have that give us the authority to take back what's ours legally. But it also creates a guard rail to forces bad actors to behave better.

My personal belief is that once you end up in court, you're both lovers.

There would need to be significant amounts on the table before I'd start a court proceeding against a business.

I have had to use the court gor an eviction, but it took a long time, cost money, and we didn't get anything back. Even then it's a last resort - usually we just offer the tenant a pile of cash to move out. (It leaves a bad taste, but is cheaper and faster than a court eviction.) The long term solution is to pick better tenants.

In business you can't stop someone taking you to court, but you can make every effort (aka give them money) to make it go away.

I’m gonna assume you mean “losers” :)

Hah - yes... typing finger issues :)

You can win economically, especially if it's a slam dunk case and hence get a lawyer on contingency. That said, it can take a long time to resolve which can prolong any stress surrounding it. And even if the other party is clearly, obviously at fault, they may spread falsehoods about you and the case. Especially if this is done in private, it's practically difficult to do anything about.

People talk about legal outcomes speculatively all the time. Talk about a real case from a real person that you know that went to court and the guy wins economically.

None of the most successful people I know are initiating lawsuitsx

They might be victims of lawsuits, they might be paying out settlements and suffering economically.

You likely don't know anyone because there is luck involved in success. Having to initiate a lawsuit would mean you are very unlucky.

For example, maybe your business partner fraudulently took most of the shares for himself despite a written equal equity split. Here, you can either sue or just walk away and give him your shares.

Keep in mind that "successful" people are incentivized to say all lawsuits against them are unfounded and they are merely the "victim". Why assume they are telling the truth? It's at least as likely that they had something to do with causing the lawsuit.

Well, you should do cost analysis BEFORE you go to court. That does not mean just how much money you should get out but also whether the other side is even capable of paying.

The government itself is often a big violator, and is very difficult to sue. The judges are not going to meaningfully punish the governments.

I dealt with such case and won legally but did not win anything economically.

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