For any lawsuit that, currently or in the future, involves content appearing on Reddit in any fashion, it seems reasonably prudent to: - Subpoena Reddit for all moderation and administration activity as it relates to said content, - Depose all moderators and administrators who have access to said content. I wouldn’t take the word of anyone at the company during routine discovery. Well.Aside, for all my brother and sister lawyers out there:
Very true. He just added a nominal nuisance amount to the legal and personnel costs for all the lawsuits about comments and posts. I would assume that the number of suits is very low however so BFD. Regarding the second last sentence, good luck for a plaintiff getting depos from all people who have access as logs would narrow that scope to those who have relevant knowledge. Regarding the last sentence, a lawyer always treats a deponent's words with skepticism.
Were they to do this they'd basically get to increase the onerousness of their discovery motions by an order of magnitude. And also terrify the shit out of their entirely-volunteer moderators. It's an elective glueball to throw into the works for purposes of making any legal motion suck that much harder for the target. And it has the potential for chilling effects against the people who actually make the site functional. Not gonna lie; saw that list and debated dumping the few mod slots I still retain.
I don't think the relative cost to reddit would be great but good point about mod paranoia. Not sure where the potential liability would lie there as HQ is really in charge. But I have seen "non-sophisticated litigants" (ie. anyone that does not do it for a living), even when the claim was absolutely bullshit, emotionally/psychologically ruined by the prospect of potential liability. I really prefer a "loser pay" model of litigation cost and I believe the States is the only 1st world country without that rule. In the States anyone can sue anyone for anything and incur no cost if they have a contingency lawyer. The defendants though have to shell out monetarily and emotionally no matter how frivolous the claim.
My liability training is related to medical devices (and really fuckin' out of date) so my understanding is likely to be off-base, but the way you go after a medical device manufacturer is you make them cough up every document they've ever had on anything they've ever done on any continent in any year for any reason ever and then you go through and ding them for shit you don't see. Then you hassle them about the documents that are missing and pursue summary judgement. Then you go through and depose everybody who kept the notebooks to determine what's accurate and what isn't. And you aren't even to litigating yet but you're already neck-deep in compliance issues and settling starts to look pretty good, particularly as your insurance has kicked in and they've got an entirely different idea about how this should go than you do. And you don't even need to get to guilt or innocence because for some reason there's a lab notebook from 1994 that hasn't been found and yeah, the jury might not assume it's full of condemning evidence but Zurich Re doesn't want to take that risk so they're going to pay the plaintiff ten million and liquidate your company to cover the costs, bitch. And that's why there are no medical device startups anymore.
That is still the way it is. The vast majority of litigation cost is pre-trial as most cases never go to trial. Insurers also always make the decisions about lawsuits and they are very sophisticated litigants who simply view it on a cost/benefit analysis. I would think that medical device litigation is very different than suing reddit about a post, which would not be nearly as complicated. Or involve such enormous potential benefit to the contingency lawyers so would not be an incentive for overreaching. Contingency lawyers too would do a cost/benefit analysis and might not demand evidence that is not relevant or go on "fishing expeditions" (an actual legal term about discovery). Server logs would narrow it down. Or maybe they would try to access to access Slack threads to find additional evidence. Who knows. But back to potential mod liability... if they were found to be relevant (of course after the plaintiff brings a motion to depose that may be contested to the cost of $5,000 or something to the mod, who of course does not have insurance against such eventuality), there is still the emotional cost of being potentially liable for some astronomical absurd amount claimed. They probably do not have deep pockets though and the plaintiff may settle in exchange for their cooperation, but that too is still a cost to the mod. This might be an out of date stat as well but I have heard that tort litigation in the States is a bigger business than the automobile industry. And it is certainly not the aggrieved that benefit the most. For some reason tort reform is really opposed by the ABA.
Holy fuck is this a good summary of experiences of friends who are in biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical device startups on either coast.
It was an extremely fucking grim existence. We'll start with the fact that you're designing shit to last two or three years longer than your clients. So. 80% of patients with atrial fibrillation are gonna be dead in ten years. If your gadget lasts twelve you're good. Then we'll dig into what the prevailing insurance climate is for quality-of-life devices and their deductibles and determine just how much grandma is willing to spend on herself rather than leaving as a legacy to her kids for those extra ten years. That's your budget. Can't make it for that? Then don't make it. Make it for less than that? Charge that much anyway because you're going to need wiggle room. Is it your IP? Or are you licensing it? Because if you've got the patents, you'll get to sell them when you're blown out of the water. But if you're licensing those patents they're depreciating every year you don't make a sale. If it takes you ten years to bring a viable product to market, there are only ten years for your buyer to recoup the expenses of buying you. I worked briefly for a company that licensed patents in 1996. It took them until 2005 to bring a product to market. By 2006 they'd burned through $70m. By 2012 they'd made $28m in sales. It's safe to say they were a good $100m-$120m in the hole when they were sold for $140m in 2013. That's a company with 80 employees burning a patent for 17 years returning $1m/yr to all its VC founders and if I'm not mistaken, the patents expired last year. What I remember most is the silicone. Everybody wants 3M. 3M will happily sell their silicone to Nike because nobody is suing Nike out of existence because of the silicone in their shoes. Medical devices? Well, you always look for the deep pockets and in any device involving 3M silicone in its construction, the deep pockets are 3M (unless you're Johnson & Johnson or Philips, who have swallowed up pretty much everybody else). So there was an entire industry that bought 3M silicone, shipped it around, sold it, bought it, resold it, rebought it, processed it, melted it, chopped it up and re-sold it in such a way that it was chemically and physically 3M silicone but not legally 3M silicone. How's that for a cottage industry? "Medical commodity laundering." Worked nine days straight once. Factory floor - our dozen-or-so talented watchmakers - built 38 whizbangles. I tested all 38 whizbangles. Put them in the designated ready rack. VP of engineering was leading shareholders through on a tour and managed to slam them all in a drawer. $140m in 2013.