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Delaware is a good forum to litigate internal corporate affairs because forming and regulating corporate entities is a major industry and revenue driver for that state. The Chancery Court is specialized in an arcane and technical area of the law, which makes Delaware better than other states for this one purpose.

Outside of that niche, I think California has a rather good body of law. For example, it features strong protections for employee and consumer rights that (in my opinion) other states sorely need.

I don't know which "bunch of BS rules" you're referring to specifically, but it's true that California tends to require greater notice when a party is waiving important statutory rights in a written agreement. I doubt that the few bits of bold text or extra signature lines (which are already in every practitioner's standard templates) are what you're really complaining about.



Employment and consumer law tends to frown upon changing the body of law by contract. I'm referring to business formation, contracting, merging, fundraising, et cetera. If you sign under California law for many of these agreements, you will often find at least 3 pages listing out specific sections of California civil procedure and commercial code that both parties will, almost every time, find it beneficial to exempt themselves from. You can't do it in a single, blanket paragraph. You have to write out custom paragraphs for each and every section.

California may have a good body of law, but taking three to 4 times longer to litigate means it costs, cetris paribus, three to 4 times more to defend your contracts. That greatly benefits deep-pocketed litigants (and contract breachers).


Ah, yep. I agree with all of that, except I'm not sure if there's a linear relationship between case lifespan and fees. The delay in California really comes from overburdened courts and distant trial dates. Anecdatally, I haven't found that this encourages lawyers to churn any more work than the case "naturally" supports (i.e., the amount they can get away with billing given the claim size, complexity, insurance pot, fee clauses, etc.).




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