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Doesn't every US citizen of legal age have access to the legal system?


"If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system." - Peter Thiel


A single digit millionaire can barely afford a home nowadays


I disagree, the Median house price is ~350k.


Single digits millionaires tend to concentrate in areas where the median house price is much higher than that.


Home ownership is not necessarily evenly distributed. Houses are becoming a safe investment for plenty of folks and entities that aren't living in (all of) them as a primary residence.

Though I'd agree that millionaires can still afford a house in most of the world.


Are you offering to pay for OP's lawyer?

Edit: This is Google, so what is actually needed is a legal team, not just one lawyer.


Many lawyers are willing to work for something like 30% of whatever payout they manage to get, OP (or rather the pastor) likely doesn't even need to pay for a lawyer, just convince one that they have a good case.

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of the legal standard is "reckless disregard for the truth", which seems like it has been met.

An entire legal team is not needed to litigate a simple case against Google, that's just not how the legal system works...


> Many lawyers are willing to work for something like 30% of whatever payout they manage to get

The printer screwed up the ad, it was supposed to read "Works on contingency? No, money down!"


It shouldn't need to be like that but it is the case.

It has nothing to do with the merits of the case itself the tactic a company like Google employs is to just file reams of paperwork, discovery, delays, motion for this and that and each of them have to be considered and discussed and pushes thibgs out at least another day or two. They then use this tactic to extend cases into years.

Although a lawyer will work for a certain cut of the reward they need to eat in the meantime and won't because the case isn't being completed, and isn't going to trial, plus it eats up an enormous amount of time and effort for the lawyer involved cutting into other potential cases.

Eventually you have to call it quits and Google wins because the case never went to trial because Googles legal army was able to delay everything by abusing the legal system.

In short as the PHB from Dilbert once said "we're using the law to keep justice away."

That's what's happening right now.


You have an unrealistically negative view of the legal system. Google cannot just file unlimited amounts of paperwork and expect either the judge of the opposing attorneys to review it, if they tried the judge might well sanction them, but also it would just cost Google a lot of money for no benefit.

You can go look at cases involving Last Name v Alphabet on the recap archive, they are typically represented by a single attorney. Below are a few examples, I manually filtered out pro-se actions with no attorneys, and class actions, but other then that just went through the list of cases looking for cases with titles fitting the format:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8060229/parties/el-mawa...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6237000/parties/gottlie...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8054663/parties/olson-v...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8067002/parties/lee-v-g...

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/8133814/parties/kaufman...


> You have an unrealistically negative view of the legal system.

Your links would be more convincing if some of these were successful, completely cases.

The question is not, can you sue Google/Alphabet without a team of lawyers, but can you _successfully_ sue them.


> Many lawyers are willing to work for something like 30% of whatever payout they manage to get,

30% of nothing is nothing.

Can you explain why the writer would get _any money at all_?

What financial losses have they suffered? Are they being defamed? Has it affected their reputation?

---

Civil courts can't fix things like this! It will never be worth Google's time to correct these mistakes unless they are forced to by the government.

Searching the Internet finds thousands of cases against Google, 95%+ of which are settled in Google's favor. In fact, I only found one successful case like this, in 2012, but it was in Australia which has stronger rules on defamation, and Google had also implied that the plaintiff was a major figure in organized crime, not "simply" got the photo wrong.

https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/milorad-trkulja-austral...


I am not a US citizen and luckily not subject to its shitty jurisdiction which renders people that are not billionaires without access to the legal system. I mean, just say that out loud, and think about what that means.


In theory? Yes. In practice against a large company like Google? No, not without several years and tens of thousands of dollars (at minimum) to sink into it.


I don't understand why your comment has been downvoted. I'm European and was wondering the exact same thing.


In which way would being a European help in this case?


I believe they were suggesting that they aren't intimately familiar with the US legal system...


It's paywalled unless you're charged with a crime and even then there's a soft paywall.




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