The current legal system discriminates in favor of the rich, because the party who can afford to buy more (or better) lawyer-hours has a greater chance of winning the case.
Laws that force the victim loser to pay legal fees don't solve the problem -- even if you are right, and if you know that your legal fees will be paid if you win, you can't count on winning, therefore you are taking a big risk by racking up large legal fees.
Some ideas:
- Scale damage awards by the net worth of the defendent. So, instead of some damage being worth $500,000, it would be worth "10% of defendent's net worth". If this radical change is not adopted, then a lesser version is to permit and encourage judges to take the financial circumstances of the defendent into account when levying damages, even to the extent of levying greater or lesser damages than the usual limits.
- Make an equal amount and quality of lawyer-hours available to each party. In theory this could be done by public defenders (if this was expanded to public prosecutors) but actually public defenders are not able to spend as much time on a case as a rich corporation's lawyers. Idea: Set a legal expense maximum limit at the beginning of the case. If one party wants to pay their lawyers more than the threshold, then that party must declare a new threshold and also pay the other party the difference between the thresholds (earmarked for legal expenses). In this way, both parties always have the same amount of money spent on the case.
- Permit and encourage judges to apply different procedural standards to the poorer party. For instance, if the poorer party makes some procedural or tactical mistake, they should be allowed to "undo" it, even if the richer party would be prohibited from undoing the same mistake. Similarly, statues of limitations should be lengthened when plaintiffs are poorer than defendents.
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