It's all about money

Money seems to spoil — or at least complicate — everything.

A state legislature or Congress might pass what seems like an innocuous consumer- or disabled-person protection law and suddenly there are people suing everyone in sight and threatening businesses.

But without that legal protection, businesses can be the ones taking advantage of consumers or the disabled.

In court, if you have a lot of money you can bully anyone who doesn’t have money to fight. But if investors decide to finance lawsuits, the bullying can go the other way.

How do you make litigation fair?

I bring this up because North Carolina last week enacted a law — the Prohibit Litigation Investments Act — that outlaws investments in lawsuits. You can still loan money for litigation, but you can’t buy a share of a lawsuit’s outcome. No serious venture capitalist is going to love that.

This definitely does not even the litigation playing field — rich defendants can still spend as much as they want.

Now in North Carolina, “a person injured by a violation of this article” can sue for damages. Of course, what they really mean by “a person” is some big company.

What exactly would this injury be? Imagine this scenario: A company is sued for intentionally addicting and poisoning its customers. Venture capitalists leap into action to get in on the damages. The plaintiffs justifiably win.

Is the bad company that lost the case an injured party that can now sue? What is its damage? Is it the justifiable verdict? That doesn’t sound like damage. And, if it isn’t, does that mean the venture capitalists don’t need to worry about the law? The state attorney general can still fine them up to $50,000, but that might be worth it.

Hypotheticals are so much fun.

But back to our original question: How then do you make litigation fair?

It’s easy: Set a limit on what each side can spend.

And then enjoy the creative accounting.

Bot billing . The rush to self-destruction continues. Why are we doing this?

I don’t know, but the legal profession might want to rethink its use of artificial intelligence. It’s not just a job killer, it’s also a fee killer — unless you can get away with claiming your bot work is people work.

Ford Motor Company recently filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles against a law firm that contained this: “Quill’s billing department takes time entered by overseas virtual assistants — sometimes referred to by Quill as ‘bots’ — and domestic non-attorney staff for a variety of tasks and reallocates the time for those tasks to licensed California attorneys who never performed the work, billing it at California attorney rates of $350 to $950 per hour.”

I don’t know if what Ford is claiming is true but, for the sake of a motion for summary judgment by a column writer, let’s assume it’s all true.

I have questions.

Why are the bots overseas? Did the computers have trouble getting visas? Are they in countries that Donald Trump doesn’t like?

Are overseas bots taking jobs from domestic bots?

If you haven’t fooled your clients into thinking the bot work is human work, how much can you bill? A top-flight human might be able to charge $950 an hour but a top-flight AI program doesn’t cost much more than $950 for an entire month. If you’re being honest with clients — and you should be — there go all the fees you could have been billing.

And there go the lawyer jobs.

And, when clients figure out how to use the bots themselves without hiring a law firm, there go law firms.

Have I brightened your day?