Kleiner Perkins says Pao is asking for $2.7M not to appeal | Hacker News Reader

Kleiner Perkins says Pao is asking for $2.7M not to appeal

arstechnica.com

78 pointsjoering256 comments

>Before the trial started in February, Pao’s husband, Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher Jr., was ordered by a New York state judge to pay $2.7 million to a law firm that represented him in his racial discrimination complaint against the famed Dakota apartments in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. [1]

What an astonishingly coincidental sum

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao-said-t...

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I keep seeing this argument made and I don't buy it.

Certainly the sums of both cases are not exactly $2.7M. Those are just rounded numbers. And certainly there is some very specific list of expenses somewhere justifying that request.

Plus, if her husband owes that debt isn't it reasonable to surmise he owes others?

Do you really think she would take the specific amount her husband owes in an unrelated case and the demand that exact amount from an unaffiliated party in an unrelated case? This is nonsense. Coincidental indeed and not even a very strong coincidence. It's rounding.

I agree the number is probably a coincidence and it looks bad to focus on it. But the lawsuits in her husband's past are important to keep in mind due to the similarities with her current case.

Once again, people try to use her husband to get to her. It would be really silly for her to do that knowing how much she and her husband get scrutinized, so i don't buy it.

Her husband is shady as fuck. I think it would be weird if people didn't scrutinize. If you knowingly are married to someone with low moral character who tries to exploit the legal system, then what does that say about your character?

I support equal pay for equal work. The stench of unethical behavior is on both sides of the Ellen Pao saga and I'm more likely to label it a con than gender rights activism.

Shady, do you know him? Do you know his story, how he was denied pay because a person of his kind did not deserve that pay that was owed to him? Now, you wonder why people have called you out for being a racist before, you just like Fox news always on the other side of the fence coincidentally!

I don't own a TV, let alone watch Fox News.

His legal actions, including judgements against him, more than suggest my claim. If you're going to choose a poster child for the plight of bisexual black men, please pick one that doesn't also happen to be a grifter.

Makes onde wonder if such unscrupulous lawsuit comes from her real desire, or her husband's.

If the former is true, it's quite ludicrous to believe the case would be an achievement for feminists.

So what if she did base the amount on her husbands debt? She believes she's in the right about the discrimination suit and wants to further the case. She is, however willing to stop for a certain amount of money.

What is wrong with that amount being the amount needed to get out of a tough financial situation? She wants something for giving up being right, and if that debt is a big strain on her family, then why not equate that strain with vindication and equal them out?

I disagree with a lot of the decisions, both personal and business, that this person has made over the course of the last several years, including the decisions not to take the 1M settlement, and then to ask for 2.7M. It makes me wonder what sort of CEO she is at reddit, which I love immensely. Her decision to implement a no-negotiations salary is interesting though, I wonder if they pay higher or lower than what candidates are wanting.

No-negotiations salary? You can bet she negotiated her own salary.

Then again, she seems to be digging herself a pit hard to get out of.

what a weird number. sounds like its connected with buddy fletcher, her husband. he owes 2.7 million. http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against-former-ny-h...

This seems like a popular conspiracy theory. But in what way does it make sense? Yes, the numbers are close, but

1) Why not pick a larger number, if there is legal basis to ask for it? Is there a benefit to winning the exact amount they owe somewhere else, aside from trolling? More money would be better, wouldn't it?

2) Why not pick a smaller number, if just a little, to avoid the similarity in the number (such similarities are noticed, as you are doing)?

It seems more likely that 2.7M is a number that they can justify legally. It may also have been justifiable legally in another lawsuit. Yes, it seems like an interesting coincidence. So what?

The same thing happened with the 16M figure from earlier in her trial - it appears both as a possible maximum willful damages number from her lawsuit, assuming she won, and somewhere in the legal proceedings of her husband's hedge fund. Again, an interesting coincidence, but the same objections arise.

Overall, the fact that people pored through all the numbers in her lawsuit, and all the numbers in her husbands affairs (one lawsuit, one hedge fund fiasco), and found some dots to connect, seems to say more about people looking for patterns than about Pao and her husband.

The article says that number is her legal expenses, right? So it seems pretty straightforward where that number came from.

This summarizes it

https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/timeline_p...

I'm not sure this is serving any purpose to any side - the only people who are going to come out happy are the lawyers, probably :(

"Kleiner's lawyers say that Pao can't use the recent California Supreme Court ruling to invalidate Kleiner's request for more than $800,000 in expert witness fees because Pao “failed to accept a reasonable settlement offer” before the lawsuit went to trial."

So... Are they claiming that not accepting a settlement is the same as malicious intent?

IANAL, but essentially in a civil case if the plaintiff is offered a settlement by the defendant and the plaintiff turns down said settlement and later on the plaintiff either loses the case or ends up winning or settling for less than the first offer the plaintiff gives up the ability to have the defendant pay legal fees in the case. Essentially it works like this. If I sue you for $100000, and you offer a settlement for $50,000 but I refuse, we go to court and I am only awarded $40,000 I would owe you all your legal fees from the time you offered me the initial settlement. There is a legal term for it, but there again, IANAL so I can't remember it.

As I understand it, it’s not about legal costs in the sense of the fees that Kleiner’s lawyers were paid, but rather costs for expert witnesses and other non-lawyer costs. Specifically, $864,680 in expert witness fees, $59,000 in deposition costs, and $40,000 in other costs.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner-perkins-a...

It’s not impossible to recover your lawyers’ fees too, but it is quite hard in the American system and you would have to show malicious intent, and there’s no similar mechanism where you make a settlement offer and can then recover based on that.

You are right, it is not the lawyers fees, but the costs associated with the case, like you said the expert witnesses, copying documents, court fees, etc... that are owed.

I'm a little surprised they offered her the original $1M. Which I guess means a counter is legitimate, who knows what the legal costs are for Kleiner.

But this is starting to feel a bit dirty. "You may have won the case, but I can make it expensive for you still." Then again, you could say that about anybody who sues anybody.

The real problem here is that legal cases are so expensive many startups live in dread of them. In bigger businesses they save a great deal of time and money by using arbitrattion- both parties agree on an arbiter and pay the arbiters fee. I read some American Arbitration Association (I think it was) claims several years ago that they were much larger and more effective than the current legal system- hearing more cases and with better customer satisfaction. Apparently even losers like it, if they lost but felt the hearing was fair.

Probably Pao and Kleiner would have both saved a lot of money if they'd been able to resolve the dispute this way-- IIRC the court ruled Pao owed kleiner money already for recovered legal fees.

I worked for a while on the same floor as a lawyer who pivoted into arbitration. She had tons of business and usually managed to settle things at a lower cost and higher degree of satisfaction than cases that went to trial.

The point about comprise agreement is they are meant to be confidential. Looks like Kleiner Perkins is playing hard ball possibly not the best tactic given the high profile nature of the case.

Unfortunately, the limiting force on all that is that you can't opt out of the legal system itself, which retains veto power over any such moves.

Even if you found an arbitration procedure that reached the same rulings at a fraction of the cost and 100x faster, you have to get the other party's consent to do it, and as long as they have to consent, they can use that leverage to impose disproportionate costs, regardless of the merit of their side.

> I'm a little surprised they offered her the original $1M. Which I guess means a counter is legitimate, who knows what the legal costs are for Kleiner.

We know what they are: around $1M, the number they may ask Pao for. That number literally represents their legal fees, that they may be able to get her to pay for as she lost.

Ugh. Super rich people fighting.

I've not seen this story on Reddit... Weird.

They've been actively censoring stories about Pao for months. This is nothing new.

Open your eyes. It was on the front page and the comments were terrible.

Isn't this just blackmail? "Pay me $2.7M or I'll continue my case against you"

This is how all civil suits work, no?

That's pretty much what settlement is.

No more than "drop the appeal or we'll demand 1M in lawyer's fees in the case you lost."

You can see both as blackmail, or both as legal positioning looking for a settlement in the middle.

I will say though, that after losing, to ask for such a high number is very brazen on her part.

The difference I see there (IANAL) is that they are asking for that 1M to recoup their legal fees as the winners of the case, and offering to waive them if the case is closed. Not sure if they're definitively entitled to that money, but at least it's the other way round.

Asking for millions of $ as the losing plaintiff to not continue the case and cause more expenses for the defendant seems like a pretty clear case of blackmail to me however. Is it still settlement when you've already lost?

If you have a valid appeal, you haven't "already lost" -- you have a case that's working its way through the courts.

The legal system isn't sportsball, and you aren't being a sore loser if you appeal your case to a higher court. If someone gives up their right to appeal, that obviously has a financial benefit for the other party. It's not underhanded to admit it, and use it as a negotiation tactic.

I don't think there is a difference. Yes, she lost the current trial, but the legal system in the US is built on appeals being a near-inevitable part of the process. Settlements can happen during any part.

What definition of blackmail are you using?

What I see is two sides producing leverage in a negotiation. If they are willing to pay $1M for her to go away, why not $2.7M? This is Pao feeling out what Kleiner's BATNA is.

Isn't there a requirement that there be some criminal activity to be legally extortion? So if she was threatening to tell the IRS about the firm's tax evasion, that'd be illegal.

Otherwise it's just everyday negotiation and settlement, right? How would you draw the line? E.g., "You've been using N more Windows licenses than you paid for. Pay $M or we'll sue for payment."

The extreme attention applied to all these stories arises out of the need of men in tech and finance to document the proof that women are liars and tricksters -- that these legal cases are all individual anecdotes doesn't matter.

You can always tell when a headline on HN is about a woman in a gender discrimination situation, usually on the "losing" end, i.e. "look at what the Women's Libbers have created, these demon women who will use PC feminism to sue and get as much money out of some poor company as they can, even when it's been proven they are wrong". It's always a very vague headline, because all of the men whose eyes are on the story already know all the details, as it is with all of these "high-profile court cases". The implicit draw of these stories, at the heart, is "she thought she was a victim and she was wrong".

If you want a more honest illustration of the reason why this story is being so focused on, look at the Ars Technica comment section.

Do you have any examples of women winning (or losing) discrimination case that get covered on tech sites like Arstechnica? ... tech sites that have articles frequently on the frontpage of HN.

If you're trying to establish a pattern, I'd be curious to see other examples? This seems pretty atypical and quite an interesting story by itself. Big silicon valley VC firms aren't often in high-publicity law suits.

The extreme attention applied to discrimination, harassment, and civil rights issues in the US is a cultural phenomenon that goes far beyond women in tech.

You deliberately simplify my assertions into other ones to make them seem irrelevant or obvious. This is intellectual dishonesty in service of mitigating the perceived threat of another's point, rather than engaging with it.

Since you open with an inflammatory ad hominem attack and never really move beyond it I'm not sure how much you get to talk about civil discourse.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

"Ad hominem" has a specific definition -- in what way does it apply to any of what I have written? Do you use a non-standard definition?

I provided a link to the definition I'm using.

Graham describes the situation of an argument being disagreed with. Whose argument am I disagreeing with?

I was just pointing out something for you to consider.

Alleging that men in tech (all of us?) need "to document the proof that women are liars and tricksters" and that the implicit draw of these stories, at the heart, is "she thought she was a victim and she was wrong" is simply misandrist stereotyping.

You cited the attention given to these issues as evidence; I think you should consider that this attention is not unique to women in tech, and is also exactly what feminist activists want. The coverage (and the jury decisions) aren't always in their favor because people are diverse.

Beyond your prejudices I think you'll find that there are men who feel the way you describe, and men who are staunchly feminist, and a lot of men who realize women are diverse: heroes, victims, productive workers, and yes, sometimes, "money-grubbing exploiters of worthy causes."

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