It's not perfect, but switching over to a "loser pays" system would go a long way in killing the strategy of the wealthy to just drag things out ad-infinitum.
> It has been argued that this might even save the government money, as pro se litigants are a severe drain on judicial resources, and this practice might weed out frivolous cases before they're even filed.
The biggest drain on government money in the judicial system is when 2 big corporations sue each other. You get 2 teams of hundreds of lawyers filling 100s of motions for YEARS which takes a bunch of resources from judges, court reporters, and the clerks.
pro-se litigation is a drop in the bucket for the government when all is said and done. A pro-se litigant simply will not be able to generate the amount of paperwork out of sheer ignorance that a real lawyer could file. Sort of an 80/20 rule. Why spend the time worrying about small fry tax payer costs when the real problem is when google and oracle sue each other.
> It's not perfect, but switching over to a "loser pays" system would go a long way in killing the strategy of the wealthy to just drag things out ad-infinitum.
Wouldn't it encourage that strategy? If the case could go either way, the richer litigant can keep increasing the stakes until the poorer one faces ruin on a coin toss. So they are forced to settle. Even if you have (say) a 75% chance of winning, the Kelly criterion puts you out of the game once the expenses reach a certain level.
This wouldn't prevent all cases, for sure. Especially cases where there's some merit to the claim. However, for cases where it's 90:10 or 99:1, it'll stop those cases. In those obvious cases it wouldn't surprise me to see more law firms lining up to take the case on a contingency basis. It's easy money and the person that'll pay them is the rich litigant.
The real problem, IMO, is this will disincentivize meritorious lawsuits from poorer people against the wealthy. Perhaps that could be fixed by narrowing the scope of "loser pays" to cases like defamation and libel.
> It has been argued that this might even save the government money, as pro se litigants are a severe drain on judicial resources, and this practice might weed out frivolous cases before they're even filed.
The biggest drain on government money in the judicial system is when 2 big corporations sue each other. You get 2 teams of hundreds of lawyers filling 100s of motions for YEARS which takes a bunch of resources from judges, court reporters, and the clerks.
pro-se litigation is a drop in the bucket for the government when all is said and done. A pro-se litigant simply will not be able to generate the amount of paperwork out of sheer ignorance that a real lawyer could file. Sort of an 80/20 rule. Why spend the time worrying about small fry tax payer costs when the real problem is when google and oracle sue each other.