Eric Goldman

And we got an answer.

It's an answer that I think the defendants don't like.

The plaintiffs, I think, are happy with it.

But it's just one answer of what is expected to be multiple answers coming from additional trials.

It allows the parties to start to estimate how much money are we even talking about.

And until we got a data point like the jury verdict, really the parties couldn't even imagine any agreement.

They were so far apart.

Now we can start to quantify the numbers.

If there's 3,000 plaintiffs that are currently pending, we're talking about roughly close to $20 billion.

Now, those are numbers that are huge, and yet there are numbers that Google and Meta might think that they can afford.

So now that we know how much money might be in play, there's new grounds for discussions about settlement.

Yeah, it's a reinforcement that, again, a different jury was asked essentially the same set of questions.

How responsible are social media for the harms that their users suffer?

And the jury came back with functionally the same answer.

Now, in that case...

they were limited in terms of how many damages they could assign to any particular victim.

So we don't really know how that number might have looked if a different set of legal theories were used.

But it is the sign that we have two juries saying we will impose substantial damages on social media.

Those are two really key data points.

I think that we're so easy to focus on the parties in the courtroom.