'Legalist' Startup Automates The Lawsuit Strategy Peter Thiel Used To Bankrupt Gawker (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader writes from a report via Gizmodo: "Two Harvard undergraduates have created a service called Legalist that uses what they call 'data-backed litigation financing,' analyzing civil lawsuits with an algorithm to predict case outcomes and determine which civil lawsuits are worth investing in," reports Gizmodo. The process is very similar to what billionaire Peter Thiel did when he secretly funded a lawsuit from Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media. "Legalist says it uses an algorithm of 58 different variables including, as [Legalist cofounder] Eva Shang told the Silicon Valley Business Journal, who the presiding judge is and the number of cases the judge is currently working on. The algorithm has been fed cases dating back to 1989 and helps people figure out how long a case will last and the risks associated with it. In a presentation at Y Combinator's Demo Day on Tuesday [Legalist was developed as part of Y Combinator's Summer 2016 class], the founders claimed that the startup funded one lawsuit for $75,000 and expects a return of more than $1 million. Shang says the $1.40 is earned for every $1 spent in litigation financing, which can prove to be a profitable enterprise when you're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars." Shang told Business Insider in reference to the Gawker lawsuit, "That's the kind of thing we're staying away from here." The company will supposedly be focusing on commercial and small-business lawsuits, and will not be backing lawsuits by individuals.

Comments

Re:OMG, a months rent!

[Pfhorrest]

Look here you little shittard, a month's rent is a devastating expense for the vast majority of Americans, who barely have enough to make it until next month. The loss of a month's rent once ruined an entire goddamn year and nearly left me homeless. I'm not in quite such dire straights myself anymore, but I still can't afford to risk that much fucking money; and more to the general point, the vast majority of Americans definitely can't.

As for false accusations, a fucking lawyer with more access to the evidence than anyone except the would-be-accused relative, and an official duty to be neutral to all parties involved, told me that it was extremely likely that my entire family had been wronged, and wanted to file suit to have a judge look at the complete evidence and decide one way or another, but because of his prior involvement couldn't. He tried, he asked the judge to order the relative to produce documents that would have settled the question one way or another, and the judge said he wasn't allowed to file that motion because of his prior involvement in the matter, and that I would have to file it myself.

All I needed was to formally ask the judge "is this apparent grievous wrongdoing against me that's been alleged true?" (because honestly, I have no idea; I barely know the relative in question, and I didn't know that money existed much was was supposed to be due to my family, until unusual circumstances brought it to the involved lawyer's attention, who brought it to mine), but that alone would have cost me a crippling amount of money just to ask that myself, must less to pay a lawyer to ask it in the proper way, and in principle the judge himself might have said "no, I won't answer that question" and that would have been that, wasted a crippling amount of money for nothing, never mind the possibility that he could have ordered the production of the relevant evidence and then found it exonerating.

All the would-be-accused relative, who is already filthy rich with a lawyer on retainer anyway, would have had to do is turn over the documents the judge requested, so he could look at them and make a decision. But because it would cost a crippling amount of money to even ask someone to make her do that, I've just got to take her word for it instead, and probably miss out on the last hope for a hand up out of poverty I'll ever get.

To me, honestly, you sound like some rich asshole who could afford to go on speculative lawsuits for profit, and has no fucking idea how most of the country lives and how inaccessible the barest semblance of justice is to them. You cuntfaced shithole.