People are more worried about the worst case than an imaginary average case. Unless you can get insurance for the fee, significant amounts can be a big deterrance even when they're quite unlikely.
1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want. 10% will deter a lot despite those being cases that should happen. Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds. Their fuzzy guessing range is going to include worrying amounts of failure chance even for very strong cases.
> Unless you can get insurance for the fee, significant amounts can be a big deterrance even when they're quite unlikely.
But then won't experts be offering that insurance on easy to win cases left and right?
> 1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want.
You don't actually want to deter meritorious cases at all, but we don't have that as an option. You can either have more false negatives or more false positives. Requiring either one to be zero is going to make the other one unsustainably large.
And that's the case even if there isn't any formal penalty for filing a losing case, because there is still a time cost. This is actually the "problem" AI is creating -- the time cost still isn't zero but now it's lower and therefore less able to serve its previous role of deterring frivolous cases.
> Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds.
Having something that can tell them that is essentially required regardless or they'll be continuously initiating cases with a <1% chance of success.
> No, I don't think so. Too much research for not enough profit.
Isn't this basically how things work now when lawyers take cases on contingency?
> Time is cheap when your wages are low
Disposable time is very expensive when your wages are low. You have to work more hours just to make rent so you have less of it to begin with and then you have to spend what little you have left doing all the things you can't afford to pay someone else to do.
> It's not a binary between knowing the odds accurately or not at all. Even with good advice there will still be uncertainty.
If you know that the odds of winning are between 5% and 100% then you barely know anything and the result of proceeding with only that information would be a huge number of losing cases. If you know that they're between 90% and 100% then that's the situation where an insurer should see that and want to make money.
> Isn't this basically how things work now when lawyers take cases on contingency?
If there's a huge payout, sure. They're going to ignore you for a $10,000 case.
> Disposable time is very expensive when your wages are low. You have to work more hours [...]
That's only if you can get a ton of hours. A lot of people can't.
> If you know that they're between 90% and 100% then that's the situation where an insurer should see that and want to make money.
I'll just say it again: Too much research.
Insurers hate custom stuff and charge tons of money for it. If you have little money to spare, the fee just to get an insurance company to analyze your case is already too much for you to go through with it.
> If there's a huge payout, sure. They're going to ignore you for a $10,000 case.
The entire system basically doesn't work for a $10,000 case. That's probably about the worst case scenario. For small claims you can have an abbreviated process because nobody is that worried about always getting it right when the amount in question is $400. When it's a million dollars then it's worth the time to go through the whole process. But $10,000 is enough that you can't just dismiss accuracy concerns yet not enough to do the things needed to actually address them.
For example, you can get into federal court because you have a dispute between residents of different states, but only if the amount in controversy is also at least $75,000. Less than that and the federal courts won't even look at it.
> That's only if you can get a ton of hours. A lot of people can't.
That's when they have to take a second job or moonlight driving for Uber etc.
> Insurers hate custom stuff and charge tons of money for it.
Insurers hate bespoke stuff because their business is about pooling common risks. If you want to insure your Bengal tiger against the risk of contracting a tropical disease while being transported through Brazil then they're going to quote you the "get lost" rate.
Common legal risks are often pretty predictable and they wouldn't necessarily even have to do much analysis. List the elements the claimant would have to prove in order to win and have the insured assert that they're true and specify how they intend to prove it. If they lie to the insurance company and that comes out in the proceeding then the policy is void and liars get what they paid for. If they told the truth then they have a predictably high probability of winning and that's the sort of risk insurance companies like.
1% might not deter, but I bet it still deters more than you want. 10% will deter a lot despite those being cases that should happen. Especially because these non-experts don't know the actual odds. Their fuzzy guessing range is going to include worrying amounts of failure chance even for very strong cases.