The DoorDash case was hilarious.

Some workers tried to start a class action lawsuit, and DoorDash argued that it should be dismissed because according to their contract the workers had a duty to arbitrate.

Then when workers actually tried to arbitrate DoorDash tried to get that replaced with a class action.

Judge Alsup would have none of that crap:

> The employer here, DoorDash, faced with having to actually honor its side of the bargain, now blanches at the cost of the filing fees it agreed to pay in the arbitration clause. No doubt, DoorDash never expected that so many would actually seek arbitration. Instead, in irony upon irony, DoorDash now wishes to resort to a class-wide lawsuit, the very device it denied to the workers, to avoid its duty to arbitrate. This hypocrisy will not be blessed, at least by this order.

What happened with that? Did the arbitration go through? Do we know the % of wins for the dashers?

I couldn’t find info on this specifically. But maybe you’ll find this paper that provides an overview of the phenomenon interesting: https://review.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2...

It sounds like the 2000 employees mentioned in this article should file a class action and cite Judge Alsup in the briefs.

I would think a class action suit would be more favorable to Twitter (and lawyers) and less favorable to the ex-employees. Every time I read about them, they seem to sum up total damages which are less than the individual damages, and members of the class get a small check at the end.

IANAL but that’s because most members of a class action have too weak a claim to litigate. Anyone with a strong claim and the money to fight it (or a lawyer on contingency) can opt out of the settlement and fight it on their own.

It’s a lot different when it’s employment violations. The case for each employee is stronger, many more lawyers would be willing to take the case on contingency, and there’s not much room to massage the damages below what the employees are already owed

Maybe they don't expect to get much from a win regardless, but they realize arbitration is going to be much more painful to the company, perhaps even sink it. If anyone, as a class, is in a position to retaliate legally against their ex-employer, it's the high-profile tech workers.

A class action was already filed, and Twitter got it thrown out, insisting everyone needed to file individual arbitration claims.

Well, then I guess Twitter DoorDashed itself of its own volition.

They did.. Twitter got it thrown out a few months ago and forced everyone to file individual arbitration claims. That's how we got here.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557210/twitter-workers-...

There's nothing more graceful than seeing a legal counsel lay out an eloquent smack down against obvious lawyer trolling.

Legal firms will be able to soon compare the size of their supercomputers that have to respond and overwhelm the opposition. From law to bits.

whoa... like what quants did for trading but for legal, uh, wrangling...

Well, if they're rational enough... we're in a situation analogous to two hypothetical superhuman AIs on a brink of conflict: both can honestly and accurately estimate their chances of winning, and thus skip the fighting and go straight to agreement that favors the winning side as much as their estimate says it would anyway.

Which superhuman will be the first to suggest a nice game of chess instead?

Did you just assume no hallucinations?

Yes. I'm not talking about GPT-4 on steroids, but a proper GAI.

FWIW, I find hallucinations of LLMs to not be unusual or that big of a deal, because if comparing to human mind, it's pretty clear to me that LLMs are the equivalent of the "inner voice", which - at least for me - tends to spit out things that "feel right", but aren't necessary factually correct. This suggests that LLMs alone won't make a GAI, but they may be an important component of it.

Workers aren’t weaponizing forced arbitration, they have no leverage over DoorDash. DoorDash has to deal with the consequences of their decision to require forced arbitration, they are the party with power to dictate terms in the company/worker relationship. They brought it on themselves by not managing risk.

I'm wondering how much they'd prefer dealing with negotiating with a union rep than all of these individual cases.