I can give a perspective. I was filing a trademark (US) for an application that I am developing on the side. A gaming market place company opposed the trademark claiming possibility of confusion. They filed the opposition, I was determined to go to discovery with it.

After I filed my response denying all allegations, they blinked and we made a small change to the description of the trademark. (Something that I had offered them from the beginning).

From my perspective the worst that could happen is I would get to the point where I needed a lawyer (actual discovery) and could determine if it was necessary to continue.

Filing an answer to an opposition is not difficult and a little online searching goes a long way to help you avoid making mistakes answering the opposition suit.

This. You have to call a bully's possible bluff when you can do so on a shoestring.

They may seem to have unlimited resources, but a legal dept doesn't actually have a bottomless budget, and it has to demonstrate ROI to the CFO's office.

Many attorneys you might consult won't realize this, because they can't conceive of a scenario where you don't need maximal legal representation. When your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like... :-)

It’s a little more nuanced than that. Lawyers have ethical obligations to provide sound legal advice and counseling, whether they’re paid for it or not. As in, the legal ethics structure doesn’t really allow for (purposely and knowingly) doing a shoddy job. The lawyer could be on the hook for either doing a bunch of free work or getting disbarred by signing up to do a ‘bare minimum’ job. Maybe there should be a carve out for situations like this.

I thought that's where law student interns come in. Basically law firms hire law students. When stuff like this comes up, the real lawyer can give hints to the law student and the law student goes talk with the client. The law student has no real obligation as far as the Bar goes (because they're just a student). The real lawyer also never made any direct advice to the client so they are also off the hook.

Law students do not "talk with the client" in the US. They're not licensed, so are barred from giving legal advice.

In these sorts of legal clinics the students work under a supervising attorney who is ultimately responsible for the representation.

> Maybe there should be a carve out for situations like this.

There already is one, it's called hourly billing. You come up with a reasonable plan, and you decide when to call it quits later if the bill gets too high.

The point of a carve-out would be to avoid any billing.

The worst case outcome is that you lose but ALSO become responsible for paying Apple's legal bills.

I think that's incredibly unlikely, (in the US legal system there isn't a lot of cost shifting for trademark suits) but if you assume that the person responding to the lawsuit doesn't know what they're doing, then I can't rule it out.

This is why the people arguing that the loser should have to pay the winner's costs as a deterrent against frivolous lawsuits have it completely backwards.

It works as a rule if it only applies if the loser is the plaintiff who brought the case in the first place. That would indeed discourage the filing of frivolous lawsuits. In some cases, it should work the other way, but that should be up to the judge and be based on the circumstances of the case.

Edit: The downside is that it would also prevent poor plaintiffs from suing richer ones. But that is already generally the case. It's probably best to judge on a case by case basis.

You typically cap this by some metric/tables based on the suit's magnitude ("I'm being sued for $50k") and court events (e.g., adjust hourly for "representation" in court based on how much you're sued for, and then just multiply the table value for that suit-value-range with the hours in court, add bonuses for court stuff that didn't require anyone to personally show up (i.e., mail/fax suffices)). That's afaik how it's down in Germany.

Alternatively, you could cap the amount the looser pays to what they themselves payed, devising some sort of scheme to prevent exploits around lawyer-on-retainer/permanently-hired-lawyer on a large-entity's side.

loser* not looser. (I wouldn't normally comment on mistakes like this but this is an increasingly common mistake online)

I don't remember where I read this, but anecdotally, that is exactly why the United States has the cost structure we do as opposed to the rest of the world.