If you're going anywhere near a courtroom, or even anywhere near a mailbox where you would be mailing pieces of paper to a courtroom, you're into thousands of dollars. 10 relevant documents to be filed * 200 an hour = $2k, just to get out of the gate. Plus a couple hours of consultation, and a few 15 minute charges when they call you to confirm the spelling of your last name. Yes, they just did copy/paste on those docs, and yes, that's bullshit to bill you like that, but that's how lawyers work. The OP was lowballing it, even.
I was arguing for avoiding lawyers altogether by learning the subject matter, the court procedures, and handling matters for yourself. Court filing fees are tiny. The cost of your time is the biggest cost, unless you already know copyright rules and how to handle a pro se defense. It's not rocket science. If you don't want to pay a lawyer, then do it yourself.
What part of my post did you think invited an attack on lawyers generally? IAAL, so I'll just ignore the fact that you missed the point entirely, and move on.
The premise of the article is that you think it's a credible threat of a lawsuit, either because the person's crazy or the law's really broken.
If it's the type of C&D letter that you can laugh at and publicly post a silly retort to on the internet for the lulz, then yeah, go right ahead. Court filing fees may be tiny but screwing up a lawsuit because you didn't take Civil Procedure is expensive. You're saying you're a lawyer downthread.. would you really recommend DIY for any non-lawyer in any real case?
You keep putting lawyers up on pedestals and then trying to knock them down. Your question to me implies that lawyers are such specialists that you could never be expected to do their job. You do realize that law school teaches next to nothing about the actual practice, right? The rest is learned by doing. In most courts around the world, you have the right to defend yourself. If you think your time is worth more than a lawyer's, then pay a lawyer. The whole victim routine is tired.
He's definitely low balling it, I spent an hour in court for some preliminary motions and it cost me $3500. And yeah, I had to edit their documents for them because they were so fucked up, it was like they had someone who dropped out in grade 8 writing the documents. This was basic shit like fixing the year from 208 to 2008.
Perfect example of why I became a lawyer. You made yourself the victim of a lawyer that doesn't need to care about your satisfaction.
Bar association self-regulation ensures that people like yourself continue to pour bad money after bad on lawyers. But, really, you have no one except yourself to blame. You got duped.
You can fight the typical C&D letter by putting up a humorous f-you response and getting front-paged on reddit. I doubt that's what the OP was dealing with. Patent claims, for example, could be BS but you very much don't want to be the one footing the bill to test it.
Now you're just molding the facts to your argument. The issue at hand in OP's case is a claim of copyright infringement – something anyone with half a clue can defend for themselves. And no, by "defend" I don't mean "posting a snotty response online".
Exactly, even if the documents weren't fucked up it would still have cost me $3500. The value in lawyers is smooth talking in court under pressure, you hire a lawyer so your decisions aren't based on emotion but rather objective advice as viewed through the law.
Yeah, but you need to know civil procedure, probably highly specific to that area, to even be there with your paperwork in order. If you show up with an eloquently spoken story, a great logical case, and something that wasn't filed the right way, the judge will say "well that sucks but I'm here to enforce the law". So obviously the market will bear current prices, and you know as well as I do how billing works. Don't take it so personally.
You're speaking from a position of ignorance, and that bothers me. This isn't an area where opinions matter. Either you learn the subject matter, or you don't. If you don't, you can only blame yourself for being at the mercy of professional advisors.
