Molson also has rights. The discovery process isn’t supposed to be used to overwhelm or harass third parties, so he should move to quash if he really is being overwhelmed. This is the reality of our system: if you’re a witness and you’ve got evidence relevant to a case then the parties (and the court) have the right to get it from you. This is especially true when someone is already involved as a witness for one side, as here. Unfortunately, being able to be roped into a lawsuit that you’re not a party to is not only possible but probable in the USA.
I agree, see my note about giving Molson some room here given I imagine the stresses of this ongoing situation Molson's involved in and likely doesn't have the legal vocabulary to back anything. Whats actually telling here is the motions Molson posted pictures of in the thread, that says everything that's actually happening here. I'm not going to fault someone under stress and likely has a limited understanding of the legal system for getting the wording wrong here, I imagine it feels like a lawsuit, but yes, its actually a subpoena.
If hypothetically I was Molson I'd be rushing to hand this all over to the state AG and get resources from them for assistance, if at all possible.
It's interesting later on in his thread where it's clear he's not a particular critic of Amazon overall, merely this specific policy; they're turning him into an enemy either intentionally or unintentionally.
Also, witnesses testifying pretty much have to be voluntary. Consider being a witness to a mafia murder, and being afraid for your life. Do you think the system should be able to force you to that?
Speaking from experience, better be sure you word that response right, or you might accidentally give them reason to push harder/further. You need a lawyer to fight against good lawyers.
> Molson also has rights. The discovery process isn’t supposed to be used to overwhelm or harass third parties, so he should move to quash if he really is being overwhelmed
While you're right, the process of even doing this will cost you a minimum of $10k USD if you're in a wealthy area in the coastal US. Which for a corporation is nothing, you likely have in-house counsel you're already paying for that can do this legal boilerplate.
But as an individual it's terrifying and incredibly stressful.
$1,645 in 2007 in Los Angeles, for N=1.
Business partners had a nasty fallout and one subpoenaed me, a contractor who had billed them only $1,000.
Do you have a reference to that tweet? Was it removed, or am I just having a hard time finding it?
Whats happening here is Molson a expert witness to a lawsuit filed against Amazon by the CA Attorney General Office. They've issued a subpoena for information (as is their right under the legal system) for additional discovery. A good chunk of it appears to be a repeat of the same discovery the state AG office is or has gathered, but they're also looking for anything related even tangentially to Molson's relationship with Amazon (emails, messages etc) as well. The allegation here would more closely be that Amazon is trying to abuse the discovery process by overreach.
I'm willing to give Molson the benefit of the doubt in saying "lawsuit" when likely its subpoena. I imagine this is a stressful time for Molson and it can be hard to get the nuances of the legal system portrayed right. The docs he posted make it all much more clear
(When I was looking at his original tweet, when I saw "4 years" I immediately googled for California statute of limitations...)
I've had one time where I was called back in, it was related to new discovery that had been provided related to a security breach. It was from a third party and I had not been privy to the documents up to that point. Ultimately they had little or no bearing on the case but I did have to state I have no knowledge for a bunch of questions asked.
I think for OPs case, they're trying to find more gotchas. I would request through a lawyer to limit scope and or mitigate being harassed.
Who knows though, the amount of screwy games that lawyers play blew my mind.. until i remembered they bill hourly.
We are also trying to win (within reason) and we are often trying not to get sued or disbarred. (I guess I can’t speak for all of us, but…)
Sometimes the bills suck because of the billing model. Often the bills suck for a combination of those other reasons.
I also have noticed no one tends to shop around for the absolute least expensive lawyer for some reason. I’ll have to think more about that one…
What a lot of people don't realize is that on class actions where laywers are often times lumped into one big case, most of them make peanuts if they're not the primary firms. You guys have a lot of gamble to with billing depending on your structure. So all in, I get it.
Rule 26(b)(4)(E) Payment. Unless manifest injustice would result, the court must require that the party seeking discovery:
(i) pay the expert a reasonable fee for time spent in responding to discovery
I'm not making judgement as to what is or isn't, simply am trying to clarify what he's getting at. I imagine to Molson this feels like Amazon is trying to bury them in discovery
How much of my time do I have to burn for free because someone else is suing someone else, and my name came up?
But like all good legal answers, the specific answer is that “it depends.”
> the state of California filed a complaint against Amazon. They cited me and made me a witness.
> And in response, Amazon served me with a lawsuit.
It's difficult to put any weight in an anonymous comment when it relies solely on credibility.
So aything relevant to CA's claims against Amazon, or Amazon's defenses, is fair game. If your client is being sued for a Zillion dollars, and you don't dig up every possible way to discredit the plaintiff's key witnesses, you're not doing your job. This means asking about every possible connection between the plaintiff and the witness, their possible biases and gaps in credibility.
But Amazon should already have that information, seeing as it was party to that relationship? Can't he just answer with "go search your own archives" (or legalese to the same effect) for those things?
"Hey random vendor, backed by the full force of the Court, you are compelled to spend time and money getting us x,y,z and/or lawyer time arguing about it."
If a party tries to abuse the discovery process against a third party then the third party can move for sanctions, including costs.
Yes, there's definitely remedies if things go too far. Good luck with those, though. But the point is that you don't have to be the plaintiff or the respondent to get tied up in an expensive, time-consuming process.
Can't his lawyer go to the judge and have this stopped?
A lawyer for Molson could conceivably file a Motion to Quash the Subpoena, however, he has to argue from what are generally a small range of options to deny or limit the scope of the subpoena. The most common is that the request is unduly broad and thereby is burdensome. This would usually not result in granting the quash, but could secure tightening of the scope of the subpoena. I don't know enough to even guess at the likelihood of limiting the subpoena, but the general assumption in litigation is that at least some portion of a facially relevant subpoena will be granted.
https://twitter.com/dpifke/status/1663665211914481667
Amazon filed to quash his deposition subpoena, but that was apparently because they felt that it was premature without more document production. But from the picture of the order he posted, it looks like the judge has already limited the overall scope.
It also really should be covered by insurance, but in my experience you want your own counsel separate from your insurer's anyways, and specialty legal insurance isn't worth the paper on which the policy is printed. Far cheaper to just apply for a business credit card (or keep the balance on your existing one low enough to cover sudden unexpected expenses like these).
So if ChatGPT generates a bunch of stuff that is incriminating, you'll have some 'splaining to do. And potentially contempt of court of the like.
As an example, just search about ChatGPT being "confidently wrong" or "confidently incorrect". It's also possible that in restating things ChatGPT may be "colloquially accurate" but "legally incorrect" in how it restates things, given it's trained on many sources of natural language, and I think most people would choose to communicate with a court and lawyers (especially ones they assume antagonistic) with a higher level of caution than colloquialisms as they would when speaking informally to others.
Haha. You do you, I just can’t imagine any lawyer saying what you’re proposing is a good idea at all.
And you’ll never succeed in bankrupting Amazon.
That said, there is such a thing as "malicious compliance" ie complying with an subpoena by supplying the evidence requested in as unhelpful a format as possible. One that I heard of is in a suit related to the Madoff case, Madoff was compelled to produce records of phone calls made from his company and personal phones, so provided thousands of pages of very blurry scanned image pdfs in order to make it difficult for prosecutors (and the trustees, who were working to recover the funds) to OCR them and decipher who he had called. In the end they managed to do this nontheless.
Asking because I don't know - I see this a lot, but is it necessary? Surely we don't live in a time where a commenter on a news site is liable for their opinion, right?
I cannot imagine getting pulled into court because I recommended someone file in small claims court for $PROBLEM, and didn’t put “IANAL”.
As far as I can tell, this is the result of people reading lawyers announcing that they are lawyers and posting such a disclaimer, and other posters specifying "I am not a lawyer" purely out of consideration for the reader, not out of legal obligation, and getting the two all mixed up together, while deciding that both are necessary (I'm quite sure one is not, and I'm pretty sure the other one isn't exactly necessary, either).
Consider how many published pieces and TV news programs feature people who are and are not lawyers, providing opinions about the law, typically with none of these disclaimers. It's evidently not a problem. I think lawyers only bother to do it in forums because there's some remote chance that someone might be able to argue they were mislead by the conversational and two-sided nature of the medium into thinking the lawyer had taken them as a client or was offering advice in an official capacity (I'm skeptical such a case would get very far, in any event, though).
(Also it is fun to add “for external use only” etc disclaimers.)
Everyone seems to be conflating the California AG requests with Amazons.
I parsed more closely about what the ask here is, and its that Amazon is asking via separate motions for the same information given to the AG case which, due to how discovery works, they should already have, this to me reads as an attempt to press Molson legally and thus spend time and money on complying with these requests.
They're also asking for additional information above what the CA AG office asked for or may have considered immaterial to their case. Its a fishing exercise to see if they can find anything to discredit Molson as a witness.
Due to the wording in the thread, I found it confusing, but I read some of the posted pics of the asks, and its clear that Amazon is not only re-asking for what the CA AG office asked for, but also additional information. The wording makes it seem like only the AG office is asking for information.
EDIT: Also, i see some folks think this is a situation where someone is being sued. Nowhere does it say Molson is being sued, Molson is essentially alleging that this is an overreach of discovery[0] via being "buried" by it.
EDIT 2: I think Molson is conflating a few things (such as lawsuit vs subpoena) and I can't say I blame anyone, the legal system is complex and it can be really hard to remember these things under pressure. Its important to look at the posted documents more than anything, he was subpoenaed to provide discovery and I think he may have conflated that with a "lawsuit"
[0]: https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/code-of-civil-procedure/ccp-sec...