
Kleiner Perkins says Pao is asking for $2.7M not to appeal - joering2
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/kleiner-perkins-says-pao-is-asking-for-2-7-million-not-to-appeal/
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joshuapants
>Before the trial started in February, Pao’s husband, Alphonse “Buddy”
Fletcher Jr., was ordered by a New York state judge to pay $2.7 million to a
law firm that represented him in his racial discrimination complaint against
the famed Dakota apartments in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. [1]

What an astonishingly coincidental sum

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao-
said-t...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-05/pao-said-to-
seek-2-7-million-to-walk-away-from-gender-lawsuit)

 _Warning, autoplay video_

~~~
colinbartlett
I keep seeing this argument made and I don't buy it.

Certainly the sums of both cases are not exactly $2.7M. Those are just rounded
numbers. And certainly there is some very specific list of expenses somewhere
justifying that request.

Plus, if her husband owes that debt isn't it reasonable to surmise he owes
others?

Do you really think she would take the specific amount her husband owes in an
unrelated case and the demand that exact amount from an unaffiliated party in
an unrelated case? This is nonsense. Coincidental indeed and not even a very
strong coincidence. It's rounding.

~~~
hoopd
I agree the number is probably a coincidence and it looks bad to focus on it.
But the lawsuits in her husband's past are important to keep in mind due to
the similarities with her current case.

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steven2012
I disagree with a lot of the decisions, both personal and business, that this
person has made over the course of the last several years, including the
decisions not to take the 1M settlement, and then to ask for 2.7M. It makes me
wonder what sort of CEO she is at reddit, which I love immensely. Her decision
to implement a no-negotiations salary is interesting though, I wonder if they
pay higher or lower than what candidates are wanting.

~~~
charlesdm
No-negotiations salary? You can bet she negotiated her own salary.

Then again, she seems to be digging herself a pit hard to get out of.

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thomasatethose
what a weird number. sounds like its connected with buddy fletcher, her
husband. he owes 2.7 million. [http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-
against-former-ny-h...](http://nypost.com/2015/02/18/case-builds-against-
former-ny-hedgie-buddy-fletcher/)

~~~
brighteyes
This seems like a popular conspiracy theory. But in what way does it make
sense? Yes, the numbers are close, but

1) Why not pick a larger number, if there is legal basis to ask for it? Is
there a benefit to winning the exact amount they owe somewhere else, aside
from trolling? More money would be better, wouldn't it?

2) Why not pick a smaller number, if just a little, to avoid the similarity in
the number (such similarities are noticed, as you are doing)?

It seems more likely that 2.7M is a number that they can justify legally. It
may also have been justifiable legally in another lawsuit. Yes, it seems like
an interesting coincidence. So what?

The same thing happened with the 16M figure from earlier in her trial - it
appears both as a possible maximum willful damages number from her lawsuit,
assuming she won, and somewhere in the legal proceedings of her husband's
hedge fund. Again, an interesting coincidence, but the same objections arise.

Overall, the fact that people pored through all the numbers in her lawsuit,
and all the numbers in her husbands affairs (one lawsuit, one hedge fund
fiasco), and found some dots to connect, seems to say more about people
looking for patterns than about Pao and her husband.

~~~
ibrahima
The article says that number is her legal expenses, right? So it seems pretty
straightforward where that number came from.

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vijayr
I'm not sure this is serving any purpose to any side - the only people who are
going to come out happy are the lawyers, probably :(

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themartorana
_" Kleiner's lawyers say that Pao can't use the recent California Supreme
Court ruling to invalidate Kleiner's request for more than $800,000 in expert
witness fees because Pao “failed to accept a reasonable settlement offer”
before the lawsuit went to trial."_

So... Are they claiming that not accepting a settlement is the same as
malicious intent?

~~~
jeffmould
IANAL, but essentially in a civil case if the plaintiff is offered a
settlement by the defendant and the plaintiff turns down said settlement and
later on the plaintiff either loses the case or ends up winning or settling
for less than the first offer the plaintiff gives up the ability to have the
defendant pay legal fees in the case. Essentially it works like this. If I sue
you for $100000, and you offer a settlement for $50,000 but I refuse, we go to
court and I am only awarded $40,000 I would owe you all your legal fees from
the time you offered me the initial settlement. There is a legal term for it,
but there again, IANAL so I can't remember it.

~~~
guan
As I understand it, it’s not about legal costs in the sense of the fees that
Kleiner’s lawyers were paid, but rather costs for expert witnesses and other
non-lawyer costs. Specifically, $864,680 in expert witness fees, $59,000 in
deposition costs, and $40,000 in other costs.

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner-
perkins-a...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/kleiner-perkins-asks-
ellen-pao-for-nearly-1-million-in-costs-after-trial/)

It’s not impossible to recover your lawyers’ fees too, but it is quite hard in
the American system and you would have to show malicious intent, and there’s
no similar mechanism where you make a settlement offer and can then recover
based on that.

~~~
jeffmould
You are right, it is not the lawyers fees, but the costs associated with the
case, like you said the expert witnesses, copying documents, court fees,
etc... that are owed.

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MCRed
I'm a little surprised they offered her the original $1M. Which I guess means
a counter is legitimate, who knows what the legal costs are for Kleiner.

But this is starting to feel a bit dirty. "You may have won the case, but I
can make it expensive for you still." Then again, you could say that about
anybody who sues anybody.

The real problem here is that legal cases are so expensive many startups live
in dread of them. In bigger businesses they save a great deal of time and
money by using arbitrattion- both parties agree on an arbiter and pay the
arbiters fee. I read some American Arbitration Association (I think it was)
claims several years ago that they were much larger and more effective than
the current legal system- hearing more cases and with better customer
satisfaction. Apparently even losers like it, if they lost but felt the
hearing was fair.

Probably Pao and Kleiner would have both saved a lot of money if they'd been
able to resolve the dispute this way-- IIRC the court ruled Pao owed kleiner
money already for recovered legal fees.

~~~
SilasX
Unfortunately, the limiting force on all that is that you can't opt out of the
legal system itself, which retains veto power over any such moves.

Even if you found an arbitration procedure that reached the same rulings at a
fraction of the cost and 100x faster, you have to get the other party's
consent to do it, and as long as they have to consent, they can use that
leverage to impose disproportionate costs, regardless of the merit of their
side.

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hoodoof
Ugh. Super rich people fighting.

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hayd
I've not seen this story on Reddit... Weird.

~~~
wodenokoto
Open your eyes. It was on the front page and the comments were terrible.

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robbles
Isn't this just blackmail? "Pay me $2.7M or I'll continue my case against you"

~~~
brighteyes
No more than "drop the appeal or we'll demand 1M in lawyer's fees in the case
you lost."

You can see both as blackmail, or both as legal positioning looking for a
settlement in the middle.

I will say though, that after losing, to ask for such a high number is very
brazen on her part.

~~~
robbles
The difference I see there (IANAL) is that they are asking for that 1M to
recoup their legal fees as the winners of the case, and offering to waive them
if the case is closed. Not sure if they're definitively entitled to that
money, but at least it's the other way round.

Asking for millions of $ as the losing plaintiff to not continue the case and
cause more expenses for the defendant seems like a pretty clear case of
blackmail to me however. Is it still settlement when you've already lost?

~~~
timr
If you have a valid appeal, you haven't "already lost" \-- you have a case
that's working its way through the courts.

The legal system isn't sportsball, and you aren't being a sore loser if you
appeal your case to a higher court. If someone _gives up_ their right to
appeal, that obviously has a financial benefit for the other party. It's not
underhanded to admit it, and use it as a negotiation tactic.

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detcader
The extreme attention applied to all these stories arises out of the need of
men in tech and finance to document the _proof_ that women are liars and
tricksters -- that these legal cases are all individual anecdotes doesn't
matter.

You can always tell when a headline on HN is about a woman in a gender
discrimination situation, usually on the "losing" end, i.e. "look at what the
Women's Libbers have created, these demon women who will use PC feminism to
sue and get as much money out of some poor company as they can, even when it's
been proven they are wrong". It's always a very vague headline, because all of
the men whose eyes are on the story already know all the details, as it is
with all of these "high-profile court cases". The implicit draw of these
stories, at the heart, is "she thought she was a victim and she was wrong".

If you want a more honest illustration of the reason why this story is being
so focused on, look at the Ars Technica comment section.

~~~
leereeves
The extreme attention applied to discrimination, harassment, and civil rights
issues in the US is a cultural phenomenon that goes far beyond women in tech.

~~~
detcader
You deliberately simplify my assertions into other ones to make them seem
irrelevant or obvious. This is intellectual dishonesty in service of
mitigating the perceived threat of another's point, rather than engaging with
it.

~~~
hoopd
Since you open with an inflammatory ad hominem attack and never really move
beyond it I'm not sure how much you get to talk about civil discourse.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

~~~
detcader
"Ad hominem" has a specific definition -- in what way does it apply to any of
what I have written? Do you use a non-standard definition?

~~~
hoopd
I provided a link to the definition I'm using.

~~~
detcader
Graham describes the situation of an argument being disagreed with. Whose
argument am I disagreeing with?

