I hear it all the time in movies and in the news, but never fully understand what it means.
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They can afford high priced lawyers who will draw out the legal process and cause you to continue to pay your legal team to fight, hoping you eventually go broke doing so, causing you to have to stop fighting the case
It costs a lot of money to hire a lawyer and to miss work for court, and court related things.
A normal person will not have enough money.
If they proceed anyways they will be in massive debt, and if the lawyer is unsuccessful, stuck with the debt with no way out.
Note,
A company could try to prolong court proceedings, require additional stuff etc.
The longer it is, the more costs you also rack up.
Even more in debt
Say you want to sue a company. They most likely have more money than you. They probably already have a team of lawyers of their own or a firm that represents them. If they’re going to bury you in legal fees what it means is that they’re willing to spend whatever it takes to win or at least drag it out until you can no longer afford to keep fighting.
You see, lawyers cost money. Their team of lawyers can also find ways to keep the proceedings going on and on and on and on and on. Chances are you don’t have the money to keep paying your lawyer.
But let’s say that your lawyer is one of those ones who doesn’t take a cent unless they win.
Great.
Ok, but what happens if you lose? The company that just spent $15m on their defence now petitions the court to make you pay for their defence.
So, either way, you get buried in legal fees. You go broke. You have to declare bankruptcy.
holy.f**k what u up to!??
The winner in the US legal system is usually the person with the most money.. it’s just tragic.
when you get sued, you likely aren’t going to defend you’re self, unless you’re dumb. you get no free lawyer for civil law suits, so you have to to hire a lawyer (usually at an hourly rate ie 200/hr+ on the low end). and the other side will create so much work for your lawyer, that you will bankrupt yourself paying your lawyer’s hourly rate. a civil lawsuit can take years before it goes to trial. that’s a lot of potential billable hours of work for your lawyer.
The judicial system tries to impartially decide who’s right or wrong in a legal dispute, and in an ideal world, if anyone brings accusations to court which are wrong, the court would just throw them out. But the court can’t know up front which claims are right or wrong.
So even if someone’s accusations don’t have any merit, the court *has* to investigate them, and sometimes the accused has to spend a lot of time, energy and legal fees in order to defend themselves and prove they have no merit. And sometimes, the evidence available just doesn’t lend itself to a good proof anyway. So: Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, sometimes someone with a lot of legal knowledge might know just the right unfounded claims to make, in just the right way, to burden you with a bunch of expenses you can’t afford.
The phrase means that the cost of engaging in a legal battle about the issue will be so huge that you will be financially ruined (bankrupt), whereas they can absorb the cost without major issues.
There are several reasons why you want a lawyer if you are involved in legal issues. Firstly they can often judge the situation more clearly because they are slightly detached from the situation. Secondly they (hopefully) have experience with the legal process in general and this area in specific. They know to file an anti-SLAPP motion, or ask for strict scrutiny, or what *pro-se* means, or the legal meaning of actual malice. They are hopefully also charismatic and able to present your best case to the judge and jury while exposing flaws in your opponent’s arguments.
Trying to win anything without a lawyer is much more difficult, but at the same time lawyers are expensive. In the US they can be anything from $100 per hour to $1000 per hour. So if the issue takes a long time to resolve, involves lots of court time, lots of research, maybe even a team of lawyers with different specialities to handle different parts of the case, then the legal fees can be millions of dollars. Even a simple case might cost tens of thousands, and in the US, you generally have to pay for your own legal fees, even if you win.
So even if you are guaranteed to win (and given how complex the law can be, this is never guaranteed), you might spend a huge amount of money on the case, and never get than money back.
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