I am neither advertising nor criticising this site. The first I heard of it was a few minutes ago, in a comment by someone calling themselves “scrivens” to a Telegraph article called The Grievance Industry. I do not know any more about it than what it says. I just find its existence very, very interesting, as an example of a modern solution to a modern problem.
http://www.serial-litigants.com
Searching for an opposing party can be an expensive and time consuming process as there is no readily accessible database of employment tribunal decisions. Serial-litigants tend to benefit from anonymity.
This is where our service can be of benefit to parties. By searching, and collecting, this information we allow parties, and their lawyers, to check if an opposing party is a serial-litigant. Armed with information about other claims, the opportunities for achieving a successful outcome (or even a strike-out without a full cost hearing) can be greatly increased. In our experience some serial-litigants simply drop their case once confronted with a clear picture of their claims.
These guys charge £99 to do a search of employment tribunal decisions for you, temporarily discounted to £50.That is practically free in comparison to the cost of defending – let alone losing – a case at an employment tribunal. But practically free is not actually free. I wonder if it would be possible within the laws of libel to do something similar that was both open to public view and literally free to use, because done by volunteer labour, in the manner of fakecharities.org (this blog, passim)? I do not say that would be better than a for-profit service such as this; on the contrary my instincts are that a leavening of money in this type of proceeding keeps the cranks at bay. But what an interesting development such a website would be. Of course the people who could be bothered to spend their own time to track down serial litigants for public exposure would be those who had been stung by them, or thought they had.
It could become a useful tool to use before employing somone. That should ensure people would only complain if they had a genuine grievance that had to be dealt with
Natalie, I’m a little confused by your post. Are you suggesting that this be a free service? And if so, why?
Why SHOULD this be done by volunteer work?
Somebody’s performing a service — i.e. doing some work — and charging a fee for access to it. Can’t see the problem, here.
I CAN see a problem if this were done solely by volunteers — because then there’s no accountability (cf. WikiPedia). This could all too easily turn into a hatchet service, by incorporating fake or exaggerated data to smear somone.
Leave it to the market.
KdT: The market has supplied you with Wikipedia for over ten years now. Or?
Kim duToit writes, “Are you suggesting that this be a free service?”
No. In fact I specifically said that, “I do not say that [a free service] would be better than a for-profit service such as this; on the contrary my instincts are that a leavening of money in this type of proceeding keeps the cranks at bay.”
I am saying that the existence of this service, done for profit but at a relatively low cost, is an interesting phenomenon. As I said it is a modern solution (uses the internet) to a modern problem (the grievance culture).
Then I went on to say that a free service done by volunteers – something like Fakecharities.org – would be a still more interesting phenomenon.
I agree with Kim. Wikipedia illustrates many of the problems with free/volunteer models. I am not one of those people who think that free things are naturally good things. They often have a tendency to drive out the private sector provision of better quality services- just as the “free” NHS has obliterated the market for low cost private healthcare in the UK, and “free” state schools have done the same to education. It doesn’t matter who is enabling the service to be free- government funds or private donations. That effect is the same.
Oh crap Ian – now you are telling me? I’ll now have to sue my ex for a lot of free, er, um, stuff…Well, not a whole lot, but still…;-P Seriously, you do take more than a second to think before you post, right?:-)
Moving away from the “interesting phenomenon” theme, and to the grievance theme (so this might be a little OT), are the rest of you reading about Righthaven? They go after small newspapers and even bloogers over copyrights. Their tactic seems to be that most victims will pay rather than get dragged into court, even if they think they will win.
http://righthavenvictims.blogspot.com/
It is probably very good for me that sometimes the commenters to my posts obviously think that the interesting bit of them is not the bit I thought it was.
Free versus paid-for, for something like this? I have a slight preference for paid-for. Having to put money down scares off timewasters. But who knows?
What really interested me here was the evolution, with the help of the internet, of what looks like a partial solution to the plague of vexatious litigants.
Natalie, the point I was trying to make with my rather hasty reply to Ian is that there is no such thing as ‘free’ service – or ‘free’ anything, for that matter. All human interactions are transactions of some kind, whether the official/customary medium of exchange is involved or not. It is all about give-and-take. Sometimes the exchange is overt and apparent, sometimes it isn’t, not even to the parties involved. Sorry if this is even further OyT.
Well, I did say I was going OT. And I find all of your posts interesting.
Going OT this time, with the “O” meaning “On” this time, scaring off time-wasters isn’t very important. A paid-for service will invite competition, and presumably better service.
What the internet did in this case is bring together a mass market where one wouldn’t exist otherwise. Ebay is like that. I recently sold an 1890 etching to someone in England. Before the internet, he wouldn’t have been in my market and I would have brought it to a local antique shop.
Dom, your comment was extremely ON-topic and I thank you for it. For those who did not follow the link, it leads to a site called “Righthaven Victims”. It describes itself very simply as doing the following:
A website that lists the victims of Righthaven LLC’s ‘shakedown’ lawsuits that are causing irreparable harm to the blogging, non-profit and small business communities.
Publicity is almost the only weapon against these predators. It always was, but the crucial difference in the era of the internet is that someone faced with a problem can immediately make a specific search to find potential allies who have the same problem or can provide a solution. Thus the raw amount of publicity you need to fight back is far less than hitherto.
“…the crucial difference in the era of the internet is that someone faced with a problem can immediately make a specific search to find potential allies…”
Exactly. BTW, Clayton Cramer’s blog was a victim. It’s invitation only now (unless he has changed it) and the archives are gone. What a crime!
Natalie Solent writes:
“Kim duToit writes, “Are you suggesting that this be a free service?”
No. In fact I specifically said that, “I do not say that [a free service] would be better than a for-profit service such as this; on the contrary my instincts are that a leavening of money in this type of proceeding keeps the cranks at bay.”
A mere fee is not enough. It’s more than just ‘keeping (the) cranks at bay’ – would that all of our problems were that simple. You have to keep the deliberately-malicious at bay also. Many recent examples have shown that persons in positions of trust are easily suborned for trivial sums of money, or for reasons that have nothing to do with money – $100 to place a suitcase into the airport baggage system? An immigration officer who placed his wife on the no-fly list? And so on.
I think it’s a bad idea all around. More people need to look at ideas like this and ask themselves, ‘how easily could this be used by my worst enemy to screw up MY life?’ and THEN decide whether it’s still a good idea.
llater,
llamas
Llamas, point taken if it were a matter of people putting a screed on the internet about “how X ruined my life”. However I’d have thought the law of libel stopped them doing too much of that anyway. ( Though I have seen such stuff, and I thought that was an interesting phenomenon too! Interesting does not always mean good.)
However all that the company I linked to undertake to do is search the various databases of employment tribunals – in other words simply to bring together scattered sources to provide a factual statement that someone has, for instance, a pattern of bringing very similar cases. That could not be used to screw up one’s life unless one did, actually, have a pattern of bringing very similar cases.
Natalie, I understood your meaning perfectly. I just don’t know why you’d even consider that this should or could be a free service:
…and yes, I noted your misgivings as well.
And for IdiomX: “the market” may have supplied WikiPedia, but that has nothing to do with WikiPedia’s quality, which was my point.
Just so you know, not one of my college professors will accept any WikiPedia attribution because of the plethora of glaring errors in the entries thereof. Can’t complain about the quality, of course, because it’s free.
Which was my reservation about making “serial-litigants” into a free service, and the point of my question to Natalie.
Alisa, I don’t know what your criticism of my comment is. You may have noticed that I put “free” in “sneer quotes” twice. I probably should have put them around every use of the word. By “free”, what I meant was, “paid for by somebody else”, but I thought every Libertarian would understand that without it being spelled out. We could call it “indirect funding”.
@ Natalie Solent:
‘That could not be used to screw up one’s life unless one did, actually, have a pattern of bringing very similar cases.’
. . . or unless YWE was able to figure out a way to have the company report that you were such a serial litigant, when you are, in fact, not.
That’s what I mean by suborning. If you can persuade an employee at WeIDGoldbrickers.com to take a couple of greasy 50s and put your name in the database as a ‘serial litigant’ – how are you ever going to a) know and b) recover? You think it can’t happen? Real officers get suborned to do this sort of thing all the time – you think some minimum-wage data-entry clerk with be able to resist?
You weren’t hired. Your mortgage application was denied. You couldn’t get a car loan. Nobody will tell you why, and you’ll never be able to undo the damage.
That’s why all these sorts of ‘services’ are so deadly dangerous – to the innocent. Between ‘honest’ mistakes and deliberate malice, they have the ability to completely ruin your life, with no recourse. No, Thank You.
llater,
llamas
Interesting point there from llamas.
Ian:
Exactly. Also, it is a problematic word because it has an additional meaning, and the two tend to get in each others way in discussions oriented towards libertarianism, capitalism etc.
To your (entirely justified) question, my criticism is of this bit: It doesn’t matter who is enabling the service to be free- government funds or private donations. It does matter. Can you give a real-life example where a private service that does not utilize the medium of exchange otherwise known as ‘money’ (see, we need a new word here), has ‘driven out the private sector provision of better quality services’?
Llamas – like the immigration officer who put his wife on the No Fly list while she was on holiday back in Pakistan!
This of course is what the DPA is for. And the original court records would show that the list was wrong.
Protections are required, but even if it was only accessible to people who were currently subject to a claim from a person being told their claim history it would deal with what may be a significant irritant.
Oh, and:
I think I got something in my eye…;-)
A relative of mine – a habitual fraudster – ran a fraudulent credit reference agency. Amongst other things this outfit did he published (for a subscription) a black list of companies with bad debts. I know of no deliberate abuse of this list though it would surprise me if there wasn’t any considering the rogues he employed but it was riddled with errors. The one I recall was a medium-sized business black-listed for owing the princely sum of 4p which was clearly a rounding error or some such.
llamas, It is not that I disagree about the danger from corrupt employees of private companies – and the greater danger from corrupt employees of governments – messing around with personal information on databases. I had a post on this topic a while back: A favour for a friend in the database state. That described a case where a policeman accessed the police national computer in order to allow friends of his to carry out a revenge attack on an old man for a trivial dispute. There is another case mentioned in the comments to that, where animal rights activists used a mole in the DVLA to track down the addresses of people they wished to target. It happens. It is a threat.
However, the decisions of tribunals have always been public; it is just that they are not easy to gather together.There is also a yes-or-no quality to this information that is some protection against abuse.
@ Natalie Solent:
“There is also a yes-or-no quality to this information that is some protection against abuse.
There is also a yes-or-no quality to this information that makes it the perfect vehicle for untraceable and catastrophic abuse.
There – fixed it for you.
This is no different than the hundred other unaccountable, secret databases which hold your life and future at their mercy. Whether it’s a CRB check, or a pre-employment drug test, or a credit bureau, these databases have the potential to ruin your life. The simplicity of the answer provided is no guarantee of its quality, especially as (like all the other databases) it will be secret – not only its contents, but its very use will be secret – and so you will have no ability to even learn what it was that was used against you. The damage caused by simple error – never mind malice – is usually enough to reject the use of almost all such tools.
Trial and conviction upon secret evidence with no right of appeal.
It’s long past time that we revolt against the use of databases like this to control our lives. And any database, or any other technique like this, should be seen through the lens sometimes suggested by Bruce Schneier – how could I manipulate this tool to ruin someone’s life? When you look at something with a malicious bent, it’s surprising how unwise it can suddenly look.
llater,
llamas
Llamas, I just don’t understand your point. It’s one thing to rail against credit bureaus, which rely on secret, proprietary computer algorithms to derive their credit scores*, and quite another to complain about someone gathering together disparate data which is legitimately in the public record. Living in the US, you know as well as I that frivolous lawsuits and litigation abuse are widespread and endemic here. This seems like a sensible and meritorious method of fighting back against at least one small part of that problem. What would you propose in its place? Or are you suggesting that the hapless defendants should have no redress? Sorry, but I find that unacceptable.
And I can’t fathom how being erroneously (whether accidentally or otherwise) included in a list of “serial litigants” could possibly “ruin” one’s life. At worst the defendant in your lawsuit will raise it as a defense or counterclaim, either of which you would have perfectly adequate means to rebut.
I think you’re jumping to extremes here over nothing. Are you out of real issues to argue about, or did you just forget to take your meds today?
* Incidentally, while I cannot speak to CRB checks or pre-employment drug tests, you are simply wrong about credit bureaus. Federal law requires that anyone denying you credit on the basis of a credit report advise you of that fact, and it also gives everyone the right to examine what those bureaus say about him and a means to correct any factual errors they may contain. It’s not perfect, but nothing human is.
Natalie, you always seem to post topics of interest to me. I bet you are fascinating at parties.
My first thought on being presented with the idea of providing a service to point out serial litigants for a reasonable fee is how much I admired the enterprise of whoever has concocted it. I dont know how it is in the UK, but in ‘Merika*, the supply of lawyers far exceeds demand, so being clever about what sorts of services one offers is an interesting reflection of market pressure.
* Read that word with a George W. Bush voice, and the meaning becomes immediately clear.