Sam Altman is the OpenAI chief honcho, which released ChatGPT. And Ann Atlman is his younger sister. She has sued him for sexually abusing her starting from the age of three. Sam has denied the charge.
But this post isn’t really about that. In fact, I didn’t bother to even read the complaint.
This post instead is about Ann Altman’s lawyer, Ryan Mahoney. What did Mahoney do to raise my ire to write of him? Nothing wrong. He did something that made me applaud.
If people write about lawyers doing crappy things, shouldn’t we take notice when the lawyering is done right?
Some years ago I had screamed into the blogosphere about lawyers that put ginormous monetary claims in their lawsuits here in New York. It’s not allowed anymore, but some do it anyway. (See: Death by Red Bull, An $85M Lawsuit, And The Money Shot; and The $30M Dog Bite)
The lawyers do it because they don’t know the law (unlikely) or because they care more about seeing their names in the paper, to generate more traffic to their firms.
But each time it happens, a couple things occur: First, the headlines lead their stories with the money quotes, so the story is now about the money, not the safety failure that brought on the injury. Second, the headlines are things that jurors remember, making jury selection more difficult than it already is as many people have their minds poisoned by outlier claims that make the headlines.
Now back to the Sam Altman case and Ryan Mahoney. In this New York Times piece I see the following:
Ms. Altman’s lawsuit requests a jury trial and damages in excess of $75,000. Ms. Altman’s lawyer, Ryan Mahoney, said in an interview with The Times that the amount was the minimum required for a federal suit of this kind. He said that if the suit proceeded to a jury trial, he and his client would seek “an amount that fully compensates my client for what happened to her.”
Mahoney was offered the money shot. “Tell us how much you want!,” asked the press. He declined. So the story is now about the issue, and not the money. The money bit is buried in the 10th paragraph of a 12-paragraph article.
I have no idea if the case has merit or not, but for my purposes that doesn’t matter today. I just see a lawyer handling the press the way it is supposed to be done.