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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.
Filing documents and other case-related expenses are not free, but the lawyer's time is.
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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 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:
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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.
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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