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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1245 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 27, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?

Define "legal expenses".

The first thing I'd do if faced with those rules is outsource everything from the law office. Instead of the lawyers hiring a forensic accountant to review the accounts, the accounting department would hire them and provide the report to the lawyers for free. Instead of lawyers hiring a mock jury, the marketing department would hire a research panel. If you allow splitting hairs enough, then the compliance team does legal research and provides it for free to the litigation team.

Even without deliberate dodging, large corporations simply have a lot of those resources available from other departments, and the incremental cost to get the lawyers that information is near-zero.

You'd need a set of ancillary rules for these kinds of loopholes with additional regulations on lawyers to maintain papertrail records "showing their work" and some sort of audit system in place. Indeed it may be that no effective system to prevent this kind of activity exists, but I'd hope the core rule at least makes it marginally more difficult to just overwhelm someone by outspending?

The danger with that is that the line is blurry. If you're too strict, then Joe Random gets gifted ten million dollars just for filing a lawsuit against Google, because they have corporate-standard recordkeeping, auditing, and accounting which is helpful to lawyers.

How about as long as materials are shared in full (i.e., not cherry picked) to the opposing party, the relevant expenses do not need to be matched? Seems about as enforceable as insider trading rules?

Then all that information is practically public. I don't think that's a very palatable solution.

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