Under the strengthened rules, if plaintiffs fail to produce adequate expert reports within 120 days of filing their cases, they are liable for defendants' legal fees.
The unions were ordered to stop the boycott, and the Chinese were awarded $1,750 from the defendants for fees and expenses.
Indeed, there is no risk for plaintiffs at all, since even if they lose, they do not have to pay the defendants' legal fees.
Almost anyone can file a CEQA lawsuit against any project they dislike; plaintiffs win half of the cases they enter, and when they lose they do not need to cover defendants' legal fees (the reverse does not apply).
Thanks to the practice of charging defendants court fees and other vague-sounding "assessments," poor people are already at an enormous disadvantage when they get vacuumed up by the drug war obsessed criminal justice system, and they'll most likely be pressured into making guilty pleas even if they could beat the charges in court with the aid of a good lawyer.
Similarly, the proposed SHIELD Act may force patent trolls to pay the defendant's legal fees, but the defendant must still first spend time litigating to invalidate or prove non-infringement, and then seek successful collection from the PAE.
In a hearing this past summer, Judge Jed S. Rakoff, a federal judge in Manhattan who was presiding over a Madoff trustee lawsuit against several bank defendants, questioned the fees piling up in the case.
The judge, Roy L. Pearson, filed an opposition to the defendants' motion for fees Friday, saying he should not have to pay the $82,907.50 that the owners of the business, the Chung family, owe from defending themselves against his lawsuit.
The selling plaintiff not only lost the lawsuit but the trial court awarded the purchasing defendants $172,391.75 in fees and costs.
And remember, Britain is a "loser pays" system requiring that anyone bringing a lawsuit which fails must pay the defendant's lawyers' fees.
