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ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

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Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#51

Post by CPLX »

josefresco wrote: post #44
rubiquity wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the Zenefits founder rescinded a job offer to someone that asked on Quora whether they should accept the offer from Zenefits or some other company.

To be fair, the applicant "slammed" Zenefits by saying that having their name on his resume would be less valuable than others when applying FOR A NEW JOB (my emphasis). If an employee applied to work for my business and one of their "concerns" was how our company would appear on their resume (in contrast to another), I would similarly discard their application.

Fine, then don't hire him.

The mistake wasn't the hiring decision, clearly it was getting into an argument with a prospective employee in a public internet posting.

That shows a serious lack of judgement and poor leadership.

And moreover this isn't a photo sharing business he's running, when you're asking people to trust you with their income and their medical coverage you are going to be held to a higher standard.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#52

Post by at-fates-hands »

DannyBee wrote: post #16
ceejayoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ADP's legal department is likely larger than Zenefits itself, and well funded. They can probably drag it out for quite a while.

Maybe? This is an oft-repeated claim, but my experience tells me differently. Contrary to popular tv shows, there is only so much that can happen. Lawsuits drag on whether someone is trying or not :) Barring some outliers, the difference between lawsuits that are dragged out and ones that aren't is not a factor of 10, it's probably a factor of 1.2. State court is kind of a crapshoot, for sure. But you are super-unlik…

Depends on what you deem to be lengthy.

Most defamation suits take around a year or so to get to trial. As a litmus test, the recent Jesse Ventura defamation suit took two years to conclude.

This doesn't include appeals either, which can drag the process out even further.

Depending on where the trial is set, and how expensive Zenefits legal counsel is, this could be a huge financial burden for them to undertake and quickly drain their resources.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#53

Post by nostrademons »

DannyBee wrote: post #13

Reading the complaint, ADP is not likely come close to winning. The defamation they claimed happened is that Zenefits "alleged that ADP intentionally sought to cause harm to ADP’s clients solely to gain an unfair competitive advantage against Zenefits.” Even if you argue this is defamation per se (and not per quod), about a matter of private concern, they'd still have to prove "4. That [name of defendant] failed to u…

I'm curious, do you know something about the facts of this case that hasn't appeared on Hacker News before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679312

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688442

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9686175

It looks like they were asking for users' login credentials to scrape ADP's frontend, and that Zenefits had never talked directly to ADP. The scraping broke when ADP added DOS protection to their portal; they claim that Zenefits was responsible for 25% of their traffic despite serving only 0.25% of their clients.

I kinda want Zenefits to win here, because I one day dream of having employees and from what I've seen Zenefits is much easier to deal with than ADP. But the specific actions they've taken here look really bad. It's as if a third-party site asked users for their Google logins and then used it to aggressively scrape personalized search results off the SRP; such usage would get blocked by DOS protection, and it'd have nothing to do with Google targeting a competitor and everything to do with them protecting the security and integrity of their systems.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#55

Post by jonathanmarcus »

We're a very small company (10 FTEs), but we have been anything but impressed with Zenefits as a customer. We only use them for medical and dental insurance, but in reality, they provide very little, if any value. The Zenefits software is really nothing special, and in fact, the onboarding UI is pretty poor. Now that we have our insurance, Zenefits adds zero value to us. We deal directly with United and Zenefits collects a 10% commission on our monthly premiums. Its a genius business model, and little else.

Zenefits doesn't have any intrinsic rights to ADP's system. Twitter killed off plenty of companies when it decided to shut down the 3rd party ecosystem. Facebook obviously maintains similar strategic control over it's API. How many case studies must there be for companies to understand that building on another company's platform always carries business and strategic risks?

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#57

Post by xsmasher »

nostrademons wrote: post #53
DannyBee wrote: post #13

Reading the complaint, ADP is not likely come close to winning. The defamation they claimed happened is that Zenefits "alleged that ADP intentionally sought to cause harm to ADP’s clients solely to gain an unfair competitive advantage against Zenefits.” Even if you argue this is defamation per se (and not per quod), about a matter of private concern, they'd still have to prove "4. That [name of defendant] failed to u…

I'm curious, do you know something about the facts of this case that hasn't appeared on Hacker News before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9679312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9688442 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9686175 It looks like they were asking for users' login credentials to scrape ADP's frontend, and that Zenefits had never talked directly to ADP. The scraping broke when ADP added DOS p…

The parent is addressing whether ADP will win a defamation suit; it's possible that Zenefits violated TOS and that ADP shut them down with good reason, but that doesn't mean that Zenefits defamed ADP.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#58

Post by babar »

I'm not really a big fan of ADP, but if Zenefits really did refuse to work with ADP to implement a real integration, I don't have much sympathy for Zenefits. They have enough funding they should be able to do things the right way now. I think Zenefits is trying to solve a real problem for small businesses, but we chose not to use them because the cost and the service level didn't make up for their nicer UI.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#59

Post by kzhahou »

josefresco wrote: post #44
rubiquity wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the Zenefits founder rescinded a job offer to someone that asked on Quora whether they should accept the offer from Zenefits or some other company.

To be fair, the applicant "slammed" Zenefits by saying that having their name on his resume would be less valuable than others when applying FOR A NEW JOB (my emphasis). If an employee applied to work for my business and one of their "concerns" was how our company would appear on their resume (in contrast to another), I would similarly discard their application.

If a potential employee was concerned about name recognition with my startup, and I REALLY wanted her join, I'd double down on my pitch of how we're all passionate about making a huge (name-brand-worthy) contribution to the world, and her help will make a difference.

Re: ADP Sues Zenefits for Defamation

#60

Post by randall »

jonathanmarcus wrote: post #55

We're a very small company (10 FTEs), but we have been anything but impressed with Zenefits as a customer. We only use them for medical and dental insurance, but in reality, they provide very little, if any value. The Zenefits software is really nothing special, and in fact, the onboarding UI is pretty poor. Now that we have our insurance, Zenefits adds zero value to us. We deal directly with United and Zenefits coll…

Have you ever had an insurance broker before? They're like the same thing but without the easy software.
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