rudyfink

In the U.S., a lawsuit can be either civil or criminal.

Only the government (e.g., federal, state, local) may bring a criminal suit.[1] But in both civil / criminal cases they are still a suit under the law seeking some form of ordered relief from the Court.

Essentially, you can think of "criminal" as a category of law and relief (e.g., prison) that is only accessible to the government.

Both the government and citizens may bring "civil" suits. Very generally, the remedies in civil suits are a court order to 1) stop doing a thing; 2) to do a thing required by law / agreement; 3) to transfer property, usually but not always money, from one party to another; or 4) to define a set of rules governing the parties going forward.

[1] There may be some obscure exception to this, but it is true for everything I've ever seen / heard of.

You are probably not overestimating.

Generally, I would guess conferring with the client on the facts, briefing, preparing for a hearing, and arguing a hearing would be north of, at least, 25k, assuming a lower-end rate estimate in the $800+ range and a lower-end work estimate of 30+ hours. If I had to bet, I'd go higher than the low-end estimate: both the rate and hours could be close to double. That said, the attorney / firm could be donating the time on this one.

That's cool. I admit hearing that story and thinking, "Is that how it happened? could a diver find it?" Apparently, they could! Great work on someone seeing it through.

Feel free, my contact information is in my profile. "Back to school" in this case would, usually, mean law school, at least in the U.S. My sense is it is not uncommon for there to be a gap between undergraduate and law school. Depending on your interests and background, there are, potentially, paths for working with / around patents (some mentioned in this branch) that would not require going back to school.

If you would like to reach out, I can probably answer some things for you. But, whether it is ultimately worth it or not, is a personal decision.

I've always thought a website with sliders for mate preferences would be really helpful for folks.

I get that it could get really complicated to do correctly, but even a fast and dirty version could be really interesting.

Perhaps, it might even encourage people to be interested in math.

To be clear, I was not suggesting the intent was harm for harm's sake. I was suggesting that it was in the company's/businesses' interest to harm. I agree that, often, that interest is framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost, not having to care, etc.

The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.

If by "reform" you mean weaken class actions, I would argue that is a bad idea.

Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.

I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.

It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.

Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.