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Comment by run4yourlives | Hacker News Reader

When Google's lawyer handed him pages of documents 5 minutes before the case began, why didn't he ask the Judge to defer the case until he had time to review the new material?

Methinks he should have hired a lawyer.

EDIT: Why am I being downmodded? Anyone care to explain?

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Well, one of the peculiarities of small claims court in CA (and maybe elsewhere, I don't really know) is that you aren't represented by a lawyer, which is why Google's representative was only a paralegal. Naturally, it's an imperfect system.

However, I share your view that he should have asked for a continuance, and that he could always have talked to a lawyer for general advice before going into a court.

While he harps on finding out Google's reasons, it's clear that he's not remotely surprised by those reasons when he sees them - he already had an argument prepared against the claims of TOS violations. He probably had that argument ready to go in his first court appearance, but didn't have a chance to use it since Google didn't point out his specific violations.

He didn't stall for time because he didn't think he needed to.

Agreed. IANAL and I don't know anything about CA small claims court or what grounds the appeal was on, but I would have asked the judge to not allow that evidence. Usually you can't present evidence on appeal that you could have presented in the original case. If they refused to provide that evidence in the original case, you could argue they waived their right to present it in the future.

It defeats the whole purpose of small claims court if large corporations can just ignore the original case and lose and then appeal and bring in lawyers to put on their real case in front of the appeals court.

Thats where you think wrong, my friend, for Aaron Greenspan is a Lawyer.

I know Edward Greenspan is, but I'm not seeing anything that suggests Aaron is.

I meant this as a joke: every thing i've ever read about him is something litigious.

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