It is my understanding that in the United States (at least in most states), if you win a case, your attorney fees will not be automatically paid by the losing party. Instead, if you want them to pay, you have to file a separate motion for that.
In Finland the system is different: The losing party automatically pays the attorney fees of the winning party.
The rationale sounds very reasonable: If you are innocent, you shouldn't be punished in any way. No consequences should be bestowed upon you, such as monetary loss, if you have done nothing wrong. This deters abusing the judiciary system to bully innocent people and causing them monetary loss by spuriously suing them. If your claim was spurious, and you lose, then you pay their attorney fees; they don't have to pay anything. Moreover, if you are the victim, and you are the one suing the other party because of a crime committed against you, and the that other party is found guilty, you shouldn't have to be paying anything to anybody; after all, you are the victim, not the guilty party here. Victims shouldn't be punished in any way, if a crime has indeed been committed against them.
This sounds like it deters abuse of the judiciary system to bully people and cause them excessive monetary harm. And in many ways that's true. However, it's not completely free of abuse (as no judiciary system can probably be).
Recently a man in Finland was convicted as guilty of distributing a movie over the internet. The court found the crime worthy of a 100€ compensation. On this day and age that actually sounds surprisingly reasonable. It's something that almost anybody can afford.
The kicker? Because of the abovementioned Finnish judiciary system, the man is forced to pay the plaintiff's attorney fees. How much, you might ask? 33000€.
That's right, a man convicted of a crime worth a 100€ compensation is forced to pay 33100€. That's over two orders of magnitude more than the severity of the crime, and well beyond what the average person could reasonably pay.
Is that an abuse of the system? Let's analyze that number:
It is my understanding that lawyers seldom work full day on one single case. Lawyers generally have several cases (perhaps even dozens of them at a time), and they only allocate a fraction of their time every day on one of them.
But let's assume that, for whatever reason, in this case the lawyer, or lawyers, worked full day on nothing else than this one case. 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. What is the monthly salary of a lawyer? It depends, and I don't have much knowledge about it, but let's be extremely generous and say 5000€ a month. That's one hefty monthly salary, but let's assume it's in the ballpark. (These are, after all, Finnish lawyers, not some American corporate lawyers with million-dollar salaries.)
That means that the lawyer worked for over 6 months, full day, doing nothing else than this one single case. Or if there were two lawyers, 3 months each, both doing nothing else than this case.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that highly, highly unlikely. I highly doubt that lawyers would effectively work 6 months full day on one single case, especially a case like this (which was just some random dude sharing a movie on the internet; not exactly a high profile murder mystery or billion-dollar fraud).
Is that 33000€ figure deliberately inflated? Who knows, but I can't help but suspect that it is, for the purposes of punishing the guy for a crime that the court found worthy of a 100€ compensation.
I strongly believe that the judiciary system is being abused. A law that exists for fairness is being unfairly abused to overly punish people for misdemeanors.
In Finland the system is different: The losing party automatically pays the attorney fees of the winning party.
The rationale sounds very reasonable: If you are innocent, you shouldn't be punished in any way. No consequences should be bestowed upon you, such as monetary loss, if you have done nothing wrong. This deters abusing the judiciary system to bully innocent people and causing them monetary loss by spuriously suing them. If your claim was spurious, and you lose, then you pay their attorney fees; they don't have to pay anything. Moreover, if you are the victim, and you are the one suing the other party because of a crime committed against you, and the that other party is found guilty, you shouldn't have to be paying anything to anybody; after all, you are the victim, not the guilty party here. Victims shouldn't be punished in any way, if a crime has indeed been committed against them.
This sounds like it deters abuse of the judiciary system to bully people and cause them excessive monetary harm. And in many ways that's true. However, it's not completely free of abuse (as no judiciary system can probably be).
Recently a man in Finland was convicted as guilty of distributing a movie over the internet. The court found the crime worthy of a 100€ compensation. On this day and age that actually sounds surprisingly reasonable. It's something that almost anybody can afford.
The kicker? Because of the abovementioned Finnish judiciary system, the man is forced to pay the plaintiff's attorney fees. How much, you might ask? 33000€.
That's right, a man convicted of a crime worth a 100€ compensation is forced to pay 33100€. That's over two orders of magnitude more than the severity of the crime, and well beyond what the average person could reasonably pay.
Is that an abuse of the system? Let's analyze that number:
It is my understanding that lawyers seldom work full day on one single case. Lawyers generally have several cases (perhaps even dozens of them at a time), and they only allocate a fraction of their time every day on one of them.
But let's assume that, for whatever reason, in this case the lawyer, or lawyers, worked full day on nothing else than this one case. 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week. What is the monthly salary of a lawyer? It depends, and I don't have much knowledge about it, but let's be extremely generous and say 5000€ a month. That's one hefty monthly salary, but let's assume it's in the ballpark. (These are, after all, Finnish lawyers, not some American corporate lawyers with million-dollar salaries.)
That means that the lawyer worked for over 6 months, full day, doing nothing else than this one single case. Or if there were two lawyers, 3 months each, both doing nothing else than this case.
Maybe it's just me, but I find that highly, highly unlikely. I highly doubt that lawyers would effectively work 6 months full day on one single case, especially a case like this (which was just some random dude sharing a movie on the internet; not exactly a high profile murder mystery or billion-dollar fraud).
Is that 33000€ figure deliberately inflated? Who knows, but I can't help but suspect that it is, for the purposes of punishing the guy for a crime that the court found worthy of a 100€ compensation.
I strongly believe that the judiciary system is being abused. A law that exists for fairness is being unfairly abused to overly punish people for misdemeanors.
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