I'm reading as why did Meta not pay its employees internally to resolve this matter instead of paying attorneys to litigate this case. The assumption being that an employee is already on the payroll so just give them an assignment instead of giving money to lawyers.

I'm guessing their arrogance told them they'd never lose the case and it would be worth it to set precedence. Only it might have backfired

I'd expect the legal team were employees, too.

They had to either fight the case, or figure out what team could actually sort this out and convince their manager to take a look.

In the unlikely event they managed the first of those tasks, the second would present an insurmountable hurdle.

even when evilCorp has their own in house team of evilLawyers, they normally hire outside evilLawyers to handle the cases at trial. in house evilLawyers might not have court/trial experience, and the type of evilLawyer that likes court/trial tend to not like office evilLawyer work. also, in house evilLawyer might not be registered in the state of the trial.

> "I'd expect the legal team were employees, too."

The article actually says this:

> "Despite Facebook hiring several law firms to defend their case, Soldati, representing himself, was able to successfully argue Meta/Facebook committed a breach of contract and that they were not immune under the Communications Decency Act"

(edited out how I originally wrongly introduced this quote)

Ah, I think your reading is more correct. Thanks for clarifying :)

Because Meta’s support system is entirely run by automation. By bots. There’s no human. No one knew, no one noticed, no one cared.

Once served with a lawsuit, most companies don't continue to rely on their publicly accessible support system.

Exactly, in comes through a separate channel (lawyers) and then actually is dealt with.

such a cop out answer. someone wrote that bot. someone can investigate logs to see what the bot did. some PM is in charge of the people that wrote the bots. their bonuses are dependent on good reviews. anyone writing automation that doesn't leave a trail to follow wouldn't be worth much. no logging is an amateur move or the move of a guilty party. hopefully, the next case will have lawyers instead of some small shop owner fighting for their life. the lawyer might be able to convince a judge these logs need to be turned over.

all i'm seeing from the work this small business owner did with this case was to find where the loose string in the sweater is. we now just need the right people to start pulling on that string.

It's kafkaesque. This happens when part of a system cannot successfully communicate with another part of the system to resolve problems, whether that's unintentional or design.