Investing In Lawsuits Beats the Street 203
guga31bb sends word on the next wave of investment in a slow market: bankrolling others' lawsuits. The practice sounds on the face of it indistinguishable from champerty. "Juris typically invests $500,000 to $3 million in a case, Mr. Desser said. He would not identify the company's backers, but said that 'on the portfolio as a whole, our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year.' He added, 'We're certainly beating the market.'"
Ah yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Treating the legal system as a business opportunity is not new, but to base a business model on it?
You guys should start cutting down on lawyer fees, fast.
Fire Sale (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the article, they only invest in cases that are pretty much a surefire win for the plaintiff. This makes sense, because if they're in it to make money, then cases that are likely to be questionable are a bad investment.
Seems to me that they're actually doing a public service, by allowing little guys who can't afford to take on big corporations who have clearly done them wrong to proceed with a potentially expensive lawsuit. No longer can the party with deeper pockets simply fight a war of attrition and hope to run the other guy dry. If the plaintiff ends up winning he gets more than he would have gotten had he simply given up, and if somebody else makes a buck off it as well, then so much the better.
Re:Fire Sale (Score:3, Insightful)
When the process of legal shikanery yields better returns than investing in real world products then it is apparent that the our culture has run aground . . .
No, it's just the logical conclusion of a culture of worshipping money.
Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many things that people do as professions that are ethically questionable but undoubtedly legal. Not to harp on Maggie Sanger, but the ethics of abortion are intensely debated. However abortion remains legal in the U.S.A. Telemarketing is almost universally reviled, but people still make a living at it.
You would expect that ethics would take a big role in how the legal system is formulated, and for the most part you'd be right. But due to the creativity of human beings, the fruitful edges of legality and ethics can be sought out and exploited.
Re:So what's the big deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me that they're actually doing a public service, by allowing little guys who can't afford to take on big corporations who have clearly done them wrong to proceed with a potentially expensive lawsuit.
They're solving a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place: the legal system is a capitalist enterprise, with heavy price fixing by the lawyer community.
Oh, and a perverted enough legal system that lawyer skill actually matters in a case.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't make laws as clear as technical documents. That's a quixotic notion held by those who fail to appreciate that other people see things vastly different from how they do. The difference between an RFC and a law is that you can reasonably expect people to follow the RFC because it is in their own best interest to do so. A law, on the other hand, will always have an exception, a border case, or some other mitigating circumstance that will require interpretation. That is the job of the courts and lawyers.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
You can't make laws as clear as technical documents. That's a quixotic notion held by those who fail to appreciate that other people see things vastly different from how they do.
But isn't that the whole reason for which we have laws?
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
So is the death penalty
Most everywhere? [wikipedia.org]
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if making laws that vague would solve anything, instead it would probably make things much more worse. All those lawyers would have a field day in arguing that the intent of a law is something different to what the rest of us think, or use the intent of one law to negate a completely different law.
Things aren't perfect as they are, but the legal system isn't this complex merely due to the lawyers. All these laws have to be as clear as possible, in intent and letter, which is the task the legislative branch has when coming up with a law.
The problem is that each year many laws are added to the system (because the legislative branch has to keep up the act) but there is very little incentive to actually remove laws to simplify the system. The more laws there are in the system, the harder it will be for a layman to understand even a portion of these laws and the more ammunition lawyers have in the courtroom.
Or to continue the analogy, what if you had 100 non-deprecated RFC's that define a simple protocol like SMTP? You would get a whole branch of IT workers through whom you would have to dictate your emails, because the whole system is so complex.
Re:Fire Sale (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's the logical conclusion of a culture that considers ethics of no consequence.
You can worship money all you like, and still create a fantastic environment (run your own company? In a company that you enjoy being in? They're not there for the express purpose of making your life fun, they're there to chase money. Ethical companies make a great place to work, the leeches will burn you out and leave you broken). However, all this activity boils down to is parasitic behaviour. When you can make more by discarding ethics, not producing anything and basically sucking the life out of anything that does produce, then the problems start.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
This is however, very borderline. It is, if not illegal, very close, depending on the exact wording of the contracts, and the exact nature of the particular cases (and also depending on the jurisdiction).
You mean like Microsoft paying an "undisclosed sum" /to fund litigation/ .. cough .. for Unix licenses.
Of course I meant SCO (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean like Microsoft paying SCO an "undisclosed sum"
American Dreams (Score:3, Insightful)
Old American Dream: Rugged self reliance, hard work and innovation lead to success and propserity.
New American Dream: Have the government take care of you while you attempt to win a lawsuit or the lottery.
Re:Ah yes. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what I meant when I said the law has to objectively resolve disputes with subjective components. Intent is subject to interpretation, and the law specifies mechanisms for testing for intent.
What is and isn't illegal is simply the first question. The second question is, how should mitigating factors be considered in answering the first question? The third question is, how is a violation punished? The fourth question is, to what extent should mitigating factors be considered in determining the intensity of punishment used?
A system that doesn't attempt to consider all elements of the case is tyranny.
So how do you weigh all of the pertinent considerations against each other? Is one of them always most important? Or maybe one of them should only be important when it crosses a certain threshold.
The whole point is that the legal system is an attempt by humans to establish methods for making good guesses which take into account as many relevant factors as is possible. Since they're at best good guesses (and sometimes bad guesses) bad results do sometimes occur. However, it's better than the binary alternatives of either not punishing any crimes or punishing all suspects.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
First you need to decide whether equity or predictability is more important in your law.
all the best,
drew
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:2, Insightful)
. In a technical document, however, you want to get the result that the manufacturer intended, so you don't try to find loopholes in the technical document.
Unless you're Microsoft... *ducks*
Courts exist so that Lawyers can make money (Score:1, Insightful)
The Civil court system exists to transfer money from people without law degrees to people that have them.
As far as I can tell there are no legal ethics and lawyers always act in their self interest, NOT in the interests of their client.
I wish that it where not so, but it is.
It is a system run by lawyers, with oversight by lawyers, for the benefit of lawyers at the expense of everyone else. They will lie or do anything else they need to to get their way.
If you don't belive me, sell your house to an attorny and see what happens. These people are pure evil.
Re:Unethical, but not illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole point is that the legal system is an attempt by humans to establish methods for making good guesses which take into account as many relevant factors as is possible. Since they're at best good guesses (and sometimes bad guesses) bad results do sometimes occur. However, it's better than the binary alternatives of either not punishing any crimes or punishing all suspects.
Further you can only really address most of these problems as they occur, hence the need to rely on precedent a lot of the time.