What happens when Little Citizen Joe legitimately sues a huge company with lots of legal resources resulting in Citizen Joe getting out-lawyered? Is he burdened with the massive cost of that? Surely the company could drop XXXk in legal bills on him
You're missing the other half of the equation.
If Joe has legitimate grounds to win the lawsuit, high-dollar lawyers will flock to him, since their high fees will be fully paid by a huge company when they win.
You’re missing the part about costs being controlled. Their high fees won’t be paid — some portion of them will.
Similar system works where I live: there’s a well defined attorney hourly fee, which is what is used to calculate the reimbursement of attorney’s fees of the winning party. If you hired better lawyer, you still have to pay the difference from your pocket. Presumably the idea is to limit abusively large fees.
Perhaps. Fraud tends to require an extensive discovery process to establish the facts, but small claims court is optimized for cases where the facts are agreed upon but the application of law is in dispute.
Good. Small fraud doesn't really matter when you are talking about patents, because they are so expensive to get and litigate. Patents that aren't valuable shouldn't block innovation.
It can. Although my understanding is that if one side purposefully generates high costs then they can get in a lot of trouble for doing so.
It's also worth noting that the UK is lowering the amount of fees you can get back. There's an upper limit on the percentage of fees you can get paid by the other side. This is essentially to introduce a higher cost to litigation through the courts and encourage sides to settle or go through an arbitration process.
What happens when Little Citizen Joe legitimately sues a huge company with lots of legal resources resulting in Citizen Joe getting out-lawyered? Is he burdened with the massive cost of that? Surely the company could drop XXXk in legal bills on him