Under which circumstances does &quot;loser pays&quot; apply in the United States? In the U.S., unlike e.g. Britain, both sides usually pay their own legal fees; seldom does the loser pay the winner's legal fees. However, there are some exceptions. One that I know of is that if someone files a lawsuit that is dismissed for lack of merit, the original defendant can countersue for legal fees. And, of course, "loser pays" applies to contracts where the contract says so. What are other circumstances in the U.S. where the loser of a litigation pays both sets of legal fees?
Each side paying for their own litigation costs is called the American Rule. As you noted in your question, it contrasts the English Rule where the losing party pays the winning party's litigation costs. In the United States, there are literally thousands of specific exceptions to the American Rule but they can be divided into these general categories: Contracts that say the losing party pays. This is one you pointed out in your question and is pretty common. Common Fund Doctrine. This is legal principle that courts have applied where it would be unfair for a plaintiff to pay their legal fees because it would be ultimately coming out of their pocket. Some classic examples are: A beneficiary suing a trustee for violating his fiduciary duties; shareholders suing the management of a company; and some types of class-action and antitrust cases where the efforts of the attorneys benefited the "common good". Contempt proceedings. See Toledo Scale Co. v. Computing Scale Co., 261 U.S. 399 (1923). This would only apply where one party is asking the Court to hold an opposing party in contempt, not where a judge initiates a contempt proceeding. Today, most states and the federal system have court rules that would likely apply here as well. Bad Faith litigation. As you noted in your question. This would be bad-faith/frivolous lawsuits and action in litigation that needlessly delay or increase the expenses of the opposing party. Statutes. This is by far the largest category. There are too many statutes to list but here is a sample of some broad categories: Civil Rights Cases (Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, housing discrimination, Americans with Disabilities Act, Etc.) Consumer Protection cases (Fair Credit Reporting Act, Fair Debt Collection Act, etc.) Landlord-Tenant cases Environmental Protection Cases Open Records Law cases (Freedom of Information Act and similar state statutes) The statutes that contain fee-shifting provisions are generally ones where litigation is thought to be in the "public interest." The idea is that the legislature wants to encourage the private enforcement of certain laws. Allowing the recovery of attorney's fees provides financial incentives for lawyer to take cases where the ultimate damages award is small and might be less than their legal fees. There is a good law review article in the American University Law Review called The American Rule on Attorney Fee Allocation: The Injured Person's Access to Justice on this topic. While it's 20 years old, the policy considerations and historical perspective remains accurate.
Not the same way as there's protection against double jeopardy in the criminal system. If Person A and Person B both have claims against Person C, even if it's for the same act or omission, each of them can independently pursue those claims. Imagine what would happen if that weren't the rule: Whoever filed first would functionally be preventing the other one from recovering their claim. What's worse, Person A and Person C could collude (say, by presenting a bad case on Person A's side) and prevent person B from accessing relief that they're entitled to. The way that the courts prevent abuse of the system by people who want to keep re-litigating the same issue is a principle called res judicata. But that's a principle that only applies when it's the same parties – say, Person A sued Person C and lost, and so sued Person C again for the same claim. This limitation protects Person B against any collusion or just bad lawyering on the part of Person A.
For the first question - No, patents are territorial. A US patent is not &quot;working&quot; anywhere else. Of course one can apply in multiple countries if the proper time frames and procedures are followed. There is a mechanism (PCT Treaty) that allows a straightforward way to apply in over a 140 countries simultaneously. Although it is frequently used, it is expensive to continue to prosecute the application in each place and even in high-value inventions only a handful of places are eventually chosen to actually pursue patents. Each country's/region's laws and processes are different and success in patenting can vary. Normally two countries would not have the same thing patented by different inventors. The patenting or publication of the first one would make it prior art to the second filed one. This should be found by the second examiner and stop a duplicate patent by a second inventor. However there can be subtle differences between similar inventions and mistakes do happen. In the case of true simultaneous invention this can happen. To get a patent, the invention must be novel - that means no one has published or patented it anywhere in the world at any time in any language. Before the AIA law in the U.S. the law said &quot;or known in this country&quot;. It could have made a loophole where something was known publicly elsewhere but did not constitute prior art in the U.S. That is now changed to be world-wide. Even if the examiner does a world wide search they might miss something and a patent might get issued even though the invention was not novel and a patent elsewhere is granted. To invalidate it the original patent owner would need to look into available procedures in country A. It might be court or it might be administrative. In most places an annual “renewal” fee must be paid to keep a patent in-force. In the U.S. a “maintenance” fee must be paid at the 3.5 year, 7.5 year and 7.5 year points in order to stay in-force. A patent who’s renewal or maintenance fee hasn’t been paid is expired for fee reasons. That can imply that it can be revived by the patent owner by paying the fees and usually a penalty. There may be a time limit or a small set of allowable circumstances to revive. A patent labeled expired for fee reasons might now be past its normal lifespan and therefore not revivable. In general patents are given to inventors and those an inventor assigns their rights to. Someone else can’t come along and revive a patent they had nothing to do with originally. There is no “re-patenting”.
Read the terms It’s quite likely that, if you took this to court, the employer would be liable to pay your daughter interest on the underpayment and possibly be fined by the state for failing to follow the law. The terms probably are offering to pay the back pay with no interest and your daughter agreeing to confidentiality about the breach. Probably - I haven’t read them. In other words, they’re asking her to sign a contract saying she gets $XXX now, and can’t make any further claims against them. Such releases are commonplace when setting a dispute and there’s probably nothing underhanded going on. Probably - I haven’t read them. Because minors can void contracts if they are not in their interest, they want you, as her legal guardian, to also sign so that can’t happen. A relatively prudent precaution on their part. The alternative is to not sign the document and they presumably won’t pay. It will then be up to you whether to sue them which will cost you money, possibly more than you will get if you win. As to whether there is a dispute: they want your signature, you don’t want to sign - that’s a dispute. Any admissions they have made in their settlement offer are almost surely without prejudice, meaning they are inadmissible in court. If you want to sue, you would have to prove the underpayment without relying on their admissions. As stated above, maybe there is no underpayment. Only you and your daughter can decide if this is a good deal.
What's the use of contracts if you can't take a contract violator to court? A clear, thoughtful contract can be a deterrent to misconduct, and Australia is one of many jurisdictions where pro se litigation is allowed. Self-represented litigants certainly have to undergo a steep learning curve and are expected to comply with a code of conduct, procedural law, and so forth, but my point is that hiring a lawyer is not compulsory. Even if for some reason the defrauded party declines to sue the tortfeasor (thereby forfeiting the recovery of the losses), there is a societal obligation to alert others about the tortfeasor's misconduct. Making the contract available to others facilitates alerting them on objective grounds so they don't become the tortfeasor's next victim, and it simultaneously helps for setting the record straight that the damages/losses were not one's own fault. Without a contract, it would be more difficult for others get a sense of whether misconduct occurred at all. Or worst, halfway down the line, you don't have any money left to pay your lawyers, and they leave the case. Hence the importance to litigate in pro per from the start. It is easy for a person retaining a lawyer to postpone (be it due to family obligations, workload, and so forth) his learning of the law. But that postponement only makes the client more vulnerable to his lawyer's subsequent withdrawal when court proceedings are midway: the client would have the dilemma of either finding another lawyer to resume the case --predictably at a higher cost--, or cram the learning curve in trying to keep up with the proceedings.
Is there any validity to these claims? No, except maybe in bankruptcy proceedings that involve additional circumstances/factors. A loan is a contract. What you describe is simply a debtor's attempt to replace the contract he incurred with a creditor. As such, the creditor is entitled to decline the settlement offer, thereby leaving the initial contract (in this case, the original conditions of the loan) in force. Generally speaking, declining a new proposal does not invalidate the contract that would have been replaced if the offeree were to accept such proposal.
Short Answer It might or might not be an anti-trust violations depending upon the states where the employers and employee are located. But, as a practical matter, it is almost impossible for an employee to prove an anti-trust violation without an insider leaking a "smoking gun" document or a company admitting to improper conduct, before a lawsuit is filed. Long Answer There is considerable regional variation regarding the extent to which legal arrangements to limit employee mobility are legal. For example, historically, Massachusetts is notorious for enforcing such limitations strictly. In contrast, California is famous for refusing to enforce such restrictions. In general, the Northeast is strict, the West is lenient and other states are in between, but it is really a state by state issue. (Incidentally, weak non-competition laws have been empirically shown by economists to be better for the economy in the sector where they might be applied but are not applied.) Usually these legal restrictions on employee mobility are imposed unilaterally by the employer without conferring with competitors, and sometimes remedies for a violation of these non-competition arrangements are limited to the employee and not the hiring company (although this is hardly universal - the intentional interference with contract tort historically arose to punish companies that induced employees to violate non-competes and duties of loyalty of existing employees of the suing firm). The anti-trust dimension comes from the agreement between competitors to honor each other's non-competition agreements, which is meaningful because in the states where Apple and Google are headquartered, non-competition agreements are basically unenforceable so this collusion between competitors has an effect in excess of the default legal situation in the absence of collusion. If Apple and Google had instead both been based in Boston instead, where their non-competition agreements were enforceable against both the employee and the new employer as a default rule of law, their agreement would probably not have violated anti-trust laws because they would simply be agreeing to follow the generally applicable law that would apply in the absence of a collusive agreement anyway. Thus, without knowing the default rules of law in the relevant states, and without knowing if there was actually an actual agreement between the competitors, you can't sue for an anti-trust violation. One of the recent revolutions in federal civil procedure, the Twombly case, arose in an anti-trust situation and held that a complaint for an anti-trust violation is not sufficient unless the person bringing suit has actual knowledge of the existence of a collusive agreement between competitors and does not merely infer the existence of such an agreement from the facts and circumstances available to the general public. It is not permissible to sue first and then use subpoenas and other pre-trial discovery procedures to determine if there was actually an express collusive agreement between the competitors rather than having their behavior arise for other reasons (since under Econ 101 microeconomic principles, marketwide price fixing by all participants and completely non-collusive perfect competition are indistinguishable as they both produce a uniform price in the marketplace for a good or service). Since this information is usually impossible to obtain prior to brining suit without an insider who leaks a smoking gun document, as a practical matter, it is usually impossible for an individual employee to prevail in an anti-trust lawsuit alleging collusion between competing firms. Under federal anti-trust laws, circumstances that have the de facto identical results to illegal collusion between competitors, where this is not actually collusion, are usually not actionable (i.e. you can't prevail in a lawsuit based upon those claims).
The hypothetical situation would be a material misrepresentation of the facts, as well as a fraudulent misrepresentation - both are grounds for nullifying the contract. Under your hypothetical this is almost certainly material and is certainly a fraudulent misrepresentation. A fraudulent misrepresentation of the facts pertinent to a contract occurs when one party, to a bargain for exchange, misstates a fact and either knows or believes that the fact is not true, or is not sure whether or not his statement is true but claims it to be true nonetheless. If a party to the contract relies on the fraudulent misrepresentation and enters into a contract based on that misrepresentation, the contract is voidable by the innocent party. A material misrepresentation is a misstatement of fact that will induce a reasonable person to enter into a contract. If a misrepresentation is material to the contract, the contract will be voidable by the relying party even if the misrepresentation is not fraudulent. So, in this scenario, the contact would be voidable because there is both a material misrepresentation, as well as a fraudulent one. If the other party suffers a monetary loss because of the deceit, you would almost certainly be held responsible for any damages that may flow from the inducement.