Yes, but the innocent parties have to win the suit in order to be awarded anything. If you have someone with a lot of money to sue you in order to annoy you, they usually try not to win, but just to extend the length of the process until your money runs out.
Not in the U.S. The winner is entitled to legal fees from the user only extraordinary circumstances (i.e., where punitive damages or sanctions are also appropriate) or in family law cases (i.e., divorces).
However, you do have things like anti-SLAPP laws so it's not universal. ADDED: And as someone else noted, litigants can recover legal fees in other cases where one party has behaved unreasonably or in bad faith.
Not to my knowledge, but that's irrelevant to the financial claims that the plaintiff is making. (To be clear, I'm not saying I agree with the plaintiff's claims; I'm just trying to be clear about exactly what those claims are and are not.)
In the US, a court can award court costs and legal fees to the winning party but they're unlikely to do so unless the case is clearly frivolous and harassing. Which isn't unreasonable because otherwise individuals could basically never afford to take on the risk of suing a company because, were they to lose, they'd be on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Somewhere I got the impression there was a rule that the losing side had to pay the attorney fees of the winning side, possibly as a way to prevent frivolous lawsuits. Is this not a thing?
If it isn't, damn. I hope I never have the misfortune of somebody falsely accusing me in such a manner that the accusation alone wipes $120k from my pockets.
That isn't how it always works. In some countries when the other party agreed to pay $30 up front then they would be considered the winner. You would pay their legal fees for trying to extort $27,970.
That true, but this ends up being a game of whack-a-mole, and even a few thousand dollars is too much for a lot of victims. Recently there was an attempt to mount a class action lawsuit, which would have settled things for everyone in one fell swoop, and it was rejected due to the arbitration clause.
Yes, but it's very rare for the winner to be able to recover their full costs. The loser can dispute the costs, which then requires more legal /court time to put a "fair" value on the winner's costs, which in itself can cost a small fortune for a complex case. The whole libel system is an expensive nightmare for anyone caught up in it frankly.
If you get paid, sure. But that's not a sure thing, and a full trial gets expensive. Would you gamble $10k for a possible net gain of $500? Even ignoring the cost of time and stress, you'd have to be more than 95% sure of winning for that to pay off over time. But a large company could well do that, because their gain is measured not just by the trial, but by the number of other people they scare off from suing at all.
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