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Lawyer Is Big Winner In Webcamgate Settlement
crimeandpunishment writes "The Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania has agreed to a $610,000 settlement in two lawsuits over secret photos taken on school-issued laptops. Less than a third of that will go to the students. A total of $185,000 will be put in trust for the students. Their lawyer will receive $425,000."
But you know, lawyers have costs too. For example they need to pay their office, wages, taxes, and paper isn't free either. The students itself didn't have any costs and I doubt they would had win the case without a lawyer, don't you think?
And the irony is? All the money came from the tax payers.
Just a reminder kids - stay in school - LAW SCHOOL.
the only winners in class action lawsuits are the lawyers.
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Skunkpost? WTF is that?
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I am glad they won and I don't particularly care that the lawyers are getting paid the majority of the settlement. What I do care about is that the people actually responsible aren't going to be punished. The settlement will be paid by the district's insurance policy and the people actually responsible will get to walk away.
I'm hoping eventually we run out of stuff to attach "gate" to.
Tough call for me, on this one.
On the one hand, I don't even bother participating in the various class actions suits I qualify for, because my dignity costs more than a $5 gift certificate. The lawyers in those situations should make far, far less.
In this situation, though, that really amounts to a pittance for even a small legal team, perhaps three lawyers plus their supporting staff, working for a solid two months on the case; Unfortunately, this one had no big corporate pockets to raid, and even in winning, the community (rather than the school administration) suffers. So a bigger payout that might really have given the kids something to enjoy, wouldn't have counted as a win for anyone.
Personally, I'd much rather have seen the school administration facing child porn charges, and no civil penalties involved. Then, and only then, could we have seen a "win" here.
It's always the lawyers who win. Always the lawyers.
The RIAA fighting piracy? Lawyers make millions. Microsoft asserting its software patents? Lawyers make millions. Porn studios want to sue a bunch of people? They call Andrew Crossley. Layers make millions. Andrew Crossley leaks the database of his victims? Sue him. Lawyers make millions. Someone calls you a dick on the internet? Sue him. Lawyers make millions. A hospital patient dies? Sue the doctors! Lawyers make millions. etc etc etc
Where does all that money come from? Of course, we as good little consumers and taxpayers, pay for everything. It's not the shareholders that lose money -- companies have an obligation to keep them happy -- but they have no obligation towards their customers or any need to keep prices reasonable.
It may not be a poor decision. We don't have enough information to decide that. (We also don't have enough information to decide if the lawyer was overpaid, underpaid, or appropriately paid. But, O Slashdot, don't let lack of knowledge get in the way of your prejudices about other vocations.) In settling a lawsuit, both sides have the same decision to make: What is the marginal risk of holding out for that next dollar? If you don't take the current offer, do the odds of getting more tomorrow weigh favorably against the odds of getting less tomorrow?
The vast majority of lawyers are scum that leach off of the rest of society. Remember, judges are also lawyers.
Exactly, we should go back to the simple days when people appointed by the king made arbitrary decisions based on their mood and how much people bribed them. That was much better.
So services are useless? I suppose you think garbage men shouldn't be paid, since all they do is feed off the remnants of society and do a job that anyone could easily do themselves?
Short answer is that he doesn't get to keep it. There's whatever he gets to keep as a part of his salary, but there's the cost of the paralegals, office, professional literature, time spent interviewing witnesses, time spent researching the case and coming up with a strategy. There's a lot of work that goes into the practice of practicing law.
Plus, if the case was taken on contingency, which it looks like it was, he has to worry about the possibility of losing and ending up being paid nothing. Which can and does happen, there's a reason why attorneys work so hard to keep things out of the courts, the jury can be very unpredictable at times.
Sure they do. There are lots of small software shops that easily charge that amount for 8 months work; and just see what happens if you want 8 months work out of a 4 man development team at your local IBM shop.
More to the point, what would you expect a developer to charge if their payment was dependent on financial success of the product they created? I.e. The software shop gets nothing if the software doesn't make money.
Rod Taylor
He didn't say they were useless. He said that 2/3 of the settlement is ridiculous, and it is. Agents make 5-20% cuts to do the same thing(negotiate, draft paperwork, follow regulations, etc).
The problem is with the percentage, not the fact the guy was paid for his work.
Indeed, why, all those lawyers, WTF did they do for Rosa Parks, and black kids wanting the same education as the white kids and all those other minorities who wanted to have the same rights as the majority, like being able to vote?
And the lawyers here in Massachusetts, who convinced the Supreme Judicial Court that, yes, gay people do indeed have the right to marry, lazy bastards, all they did was point to a couple of amendments in the Constitution and the Commonwealth charter!
And DO NOT get me started on the Southern Poverty Law Center! Suing Klansmen and Nazis just because they like to beat up and murder people.
Yeah, get rid of all the lawyers.
Until YOU need one, of course.
Thank you for proving the truth of Ted Nelson's comment about fools and computers.
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who got sacked for doing this? Who's going to jail? who's being charged with pedophilia? Who's on the sex crime watch list because of this?
Because if the answer is no one then justice was not served and no one learned any lessons 'Cept that Lawyers charge a lot for their services.
You do realize that the plaintiffs signed a contract with the attorney specifically pointing out the details of the contingent fee, right? That the rules of legal ethics require the attorney to make it clear to the client how a contingent fee works? If the plaintiffs wanted to take the entire award, they could've hired an attorney that they paid by the hour. They wanted to pay nothing up front, and the trade off is that they took a much-reduced award on the back end.
This one produced a win for privacy rights and the rights of children.
But hey, you can't get your knee jerkin' with that kind of rhetoric.
At 5 to 20%, they'd have to turn down most cases unless they were a slam dunk, or the client paid up front.
Easy there, Skippy. AC was saying that this probably wouldn't have ended well without a lawyer involved, in response to you saying lawyers are "legalized crooks" and that "the world would be a better place without them". Of course the amount the lawyer took is ridiculous, no one said otherwise.
You don't win a gold medal in ten seconds, you win it by training almost non-stop the rest of the time. And you don't charge what you think is fair, you charge what they think is fair. If someone offered you millions of dollars to write code would you say no? I've charged upwards of $150 an hour and companies were happy to pay that amount for a specialized skill set. I imagine the same thing happened here: the lawyer's take was worth it to the students.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
It is true that a single-payer legal care system would be more fair. As it is the wealthy with infinite legal resources only have to comply with about 25% of the law, while everyone else is held to a stricter standard. The poor may receive free legal aid and public defenders, but society basically tolerates them as a criminal class anyway. Really the American middle-class is hardest squeezed by greedy legal companies and should demand government recognition of the right to legal care.