Good documentary. There’s an above the fold article in the Sunday Times today about forced arbitration in nursing home contracts.
Hard to do when it’s digital which is likely a majority of contracts people enter into these days (eg whenever you install software).
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How come there is no grand jury investigating the nursing home management? Someone should go to jail over this. Aren’t class actions those things where they are settled out of court and the plaintiff’s lawyers gobble up almost all of the settlement? No thanks. I don’t want those massive legal bills passed on to me in the prices of the products and services I buy just so some lawyers can buy more vacation homes. Maybe we could have an excise tax on legal services and redistribute that money to the public at large.
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Correct, but there are two huge caveats.
First, some person on the other side will have to initial the change too–otherwise, when you’re suing or being sued for breach of contract, the judge is going to assume that you unilaterally made the change after the fact or on the sly, because that’s exactly what XYZ Corp.'s lawyers are going to be saying you did.
Second, if you can get someone to initial your changes to boilerplate contracts, it (generally) has to be someone with the authority to make those changes. The drone at the AT&T store cannot give you a cell phone contract for 10 GB/month TB/day at $90 90¢, even if you sweet-talk him into initialing your changes.
In practice, a few urban legends and lucky tricksters aside, if a huge corporate entity has gone to the trouble of imbuing their boilerplate with powerful arcane legal magicks such that the 4-point-font version runs to a hundred pages, the only way you’re going to win is if they accidentally violated a bedrock principle of law–and that’s not very likely–or if they actually breached the contract themselves by their subsequent actions. Even straight up mistakes that seem to give away the farm will generally be resolved in favor of the more boring outcome, and the more boring outcome is always what the people drawing up boilerplate want. (Remember the whole $0.02 vs. 0.02¢ debacle?)
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Thank you (and KXKVI and semiotix). It seemed far too easy.
I’ve never had to test it. I usually do it when filling out healthcare paperwork.
Somebody needs to get the satanic church in on this, they seem well placed to help out on this count. Alternatively, create a fake shariah law arbitration company and let fox news get wind of it, but i’d personally feel uncomfortable fanning the flames of anti muslim sentiment.
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