[dmitryminkovsky]

That’s what all this stuff inevitably becomes unfortunately. It’s a shame that lawyers have to mediate our access to our rights. I sincerely believe if we replaced high school with law school we’d all be much better off.

[rayiner]

The barrier here isn't really the need for a law degree. Prosecuting these kinds of cases against deep-pocketed defendants like Google doesn't only take expertise in the law, but the resources to review millions of pages of Google emails to establish how the system works and what Google's intentions were, as well as experts to opine on technical aspects as well as calculation of damages. There is no practical way for individuals without significant resources to prove up this sort of case on their own.

The realistic alternative is having government agencies prosecute these sorts of cases. It's a very good alternative, and is used in most other countries. It's an odd confluence of factors that results in private class action litigation being more popular in the U.S. (From the left, trial lawyers are major supporters of Democrats. From the right, Republicans would rather have these class actions than new government agencies.)

[dmitryminkovsky]

> The realistic alternative is having government agencies prosecute these sorts of cases.

I wasn't saying the result would be that we each tend to our own legal matters instead of having regulatory agencies. I was saying that when only a tiny fraction of the citizens is legally literate, and only a small fraction of those people are actual trained lawyers, not many people are going to be looking out for our rights, muchless even know what those rights are or should be.