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Lawyer Sues 20-Year-Old Student Who Gave a Bad Yelp Review, Loses Badly (arstechnica.com)
20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, after she was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. She didn't know how to navigate her car insurance and prove damages, so she reached out for legal help. Things didn't go as one would have liked, initially, as ArsTechnica documents:The help she got, Cai said, was less than satisfactory. Lawyers from the Tuan A. Khuu law firm ignored her contacts, and at one point they came into her bedroom while Cai was sleeping in her underwear. "Seriously, it's super unprofessional!" she wrote on Facebook. (The firm maintains it was invited in by Cai's mother.) She also took to Yelp to warn others about her bad experience. The posts led to a threatening e-mail from Tuan Khuu attorney Keith Nguyen. Nguyen and his associates went ahead and filed that lawsuit, demanding the young woman pay up between $100,000 and $200,000 -- more than 100 times what she had in her bank account. Nguyen said he didn't feel bad at all about suing Cai. Cai didn't remove her review, though. Instead she fought back against the Khuu firm, all thanks to attorney Michael Fleming, who took her case pro bono. Fleming filed a motion arguing that, first and foremost, Cai's social media complaints were true. Second, she couldn't do much to damage the reputation of a firm that already had multiple poor reviews. He argued the lawsuit was a clear SLAPP (strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). Ultimately, the judge agreed with Fleming, ordering the Khuu firm to pay $26,831.55 in attorneys' fees.
I'm more of a second post guy, by to each their own.
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I wonder if they guy linking to the Ars report will get sued now...
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Maybe refunding her the fees the first lawyers charged.
Filing documents and other case-related expenses are not free, but the lawyer's time is.
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Cai is a Chinese surname... although Nguyen is definitely Vietnamese.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I wonder what outcome the firm was expecting from this lawsuit? In what way does winning 200k imaginary dollars outweigh the reputation of them suing their own clients for sharing their experiences? Am I missing something?
That sounds like the typical law school in the United States.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/law-school-accreditors-raising-the-bar-1479751011
I was going to joke about Nguyen being as common as Smith, but according to wikipedia as much as 40% of the population have the surname. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Let's all go on Yelp and call these motherfuckers out with bad reviews!
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That doesn't sound like loses badly. That just sounds like a relatively normal loss. A normal loss should probably include attorney fees. I'm glad the student won and didn't end up having to pay money but the student was probably still out a ton of time and hassle and it didn't sound like there was any compensation to the student or punishment to the firm besides having to pay the other side's court cost. Again, glad the student fought it but the only thing the student got to show for it was to be able to keep their review online. The student should be rewarded somehow for fighting a frivolous lawsuit instead of taking the easy route and just deleting the review.
This might just be the judge's way of punishing them for a frivolous lawsuit. According to Wikipedia:
Not according to my veteran-uncle retired-postalworker with PTSD it isn't...
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There hasn't been an ACORN since 2010. You may not have seen that on your favorite fake news site.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Most lawyers are pretty douchy in my experiences so can't say I am surprised, but this guy does now get some nice karma via Streisand Effect, even got a site dedicated to his name: http://keithnguyen.org/
The original article that Ars sourced was posted July 27, 2016.
That article was from when the lawsuit began. This story is about the end of it all after the judge made a decision on the case. The date of the judgement in the PDF from the article was dated November 21.
If "filing documents and other case-related expenses", excluding lawyer's time costs $26,831.55 then I weep for the so called "justice" system.
They were paid for their initial service.
Then then sued her for between $100k and $200k.
Her new lawyer did it pro bono.
End result, their firm had to pay $26.8k in attorneys' fees.
How the hell is that "Loses Badly"?!?!? IMO, that's nowhere near enough.
She's out with a broken back and medical fees that (I'm assuming) she didn't get back.
Her lawyer lost out on what he should have been able to get.
They're all out a ton of time and effort.
Their lawyers probably still got a paycheck, and their firm just had to cover the bill for the time they wasted in the court.
Well if there was any doubt left that this law firm sucked, this lawsuit will remove the doubt. Please sue me next.
ACORN has successor organizations. New names, same M.O.. Smaller groups, harder to identify, harder to sue, harder and less effective for law enforcement to track down and shut down. Also more difficult to generate concentrated bad publicity. It's much like the blooming of communist front groups in the mid 20th century.
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toss em all into a piranha tank.
Surely there are cheaper ways of feeding lawyers.
I was going to joke about Nguyen being as common as Smith, but according to wikipedia as much as 40% of the population have the surname.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is also very common in some areas of America. My daughter attended high school in San Jose, California, and about 20% of her graduating class were named Nguyen. They take up 12 pages in her yearbook. If so many people have the same surname, then it sort of defeats the whole purpose of having surnames in the first place, which was to disambiguate duplicate given names.
Pro bono attorneys get awarded fees all the time. Just 'cause you ain't charging the client doesn't mean legal services have no value.
Put differently, let's say I find a client whom I decide has such a worthy case that I want to donate my services: pro bono. Through judgment, the representation costs me -- in time I'm donating for free, but that I would otherwise devote to paying clients -- $100k. That's real value, and real cost -- only born by the lawyer, not the client. Say, then, the judge decides that the other party's conduct was so frivolous and abusive that they should be forced to pay our the legal costs as a penalty. (Which, for the record, is a relative rarity in us jurisprudence, where parties almost always bear their own costs. You gotta have acted really poorly for a judge to do this...).
Real costs, real penalty, and often a real boon to the system and orderly execution of justice.
FML, I'd like to "work for free" and only get paid $27k for a few hours/days work.
Not really Pro Bono is it.
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Well, in a sense they could be described as Klutzes...
Let's not forget that ACORN didn't do anything illegal that we know of. They were victims of a partisan witch hunt.
(Score: -1, Stupid)
No, he wanted pics of the lawyers, not the client...
Ken
That sounds about right. Contesting a mortgage in court one would expect to cost about $100,000 or so, if it is a fairly straightforward breach of truth in lending laws. That's why there are so many self represented litigants. Laws are only for people who can afford a six figure unexpected expense. Most Americans can't even afford a $600 unexpected expense
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She was in a collision ; OK, fine.
She submits a claim for the damage to the vehicle and herself. Fine.
The insurance company will ask for supporting documentation - police crime reference (since a drunk driver was mentioned, which is a crime in most countries I've head of ; the crash and injury may or may not be a separate crime ; also "dangerous driving", "driving without insurance", "taking and driving away" ; whatever else in the case) ; possibly supervising physician's contact details (or whatever is equivalent in America) for the medical details ; possibly damage reports from the repairing garage (who wouldn't have done diddly-squat to the vehicle without communicating with the insurance company in writing).
I've never had to deal with an injury collision, but several other car crunches have come and gone. It's not exactly difficult. Where does the lawyer come into it?
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Probably graduates from some San Francisco Law "School" and Noodle Shop. Pass the Bar with the minimum requisite score and set up an ambulance chasing practice that specializes in targeting minorities.
California has one of the harder bar exams in the US to pass. If they could pass the bar in California, then they have to know some law, at least.
ACORN has successor organizations. New names, same M.O.. Smaller groups, harder to identify, harder to sue, harder and less effective for law enforcement to track down and shut down. Also more difficult to generate concentrated bad publicity. It's much like the blooming of communist front groups in the mid 20th century.
You make them sound like organized crime the police would actually give two shits about shutting down.
It's kind of freaky to look at the top ten Vietnamese surnames as a percentage of total population.
Nguyen: 39%
+Tran: 50%
+Le: 60%
+Pham: 67%
+Huynh: 72%
+Phan: 77%
+Vu: 81%
+Dang: 83%
+Bui: 85%
+Do: 86%
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
The practice was started in 1996. Mind you, there's no mention of ACORN funding, nor any reason to suggest that ACORN funding was received, but the fact that it stopped existing six years ago doesn't by itself disprove any involvement it had in starting up a business that's been around for 20 years.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
So, you support a lawyer's office filing a libel suit over things that are demonstratably true?
No, you aren't a lawyer.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?