Righthaven doesn't always look like a particularly organized operation. The company sues people who have allegedly violated newspaper copyrights, but in a couple years of operation, it has repeatedly managed to do things like sue an Ars Technica writer for infringement without realizing that it was suing a journalist who had used Righthaven's own court filings, lose cases even where nonprofit defendants copied entire articles, and anger judges who found that Righthaven doesn't even have the standing to bring many of its lawsuits.

Now, Righthaven has to start dealing with these problems in a more tangible way: cash payouts.

Yesterday, a federal judge in Nevada ordered Righthaven to pay $3,815 in legal fees after botching one of its case. Righthaven had sued one Michael Leon back in September 2010, but it didn't even serve the right paperwork in the case. When multiple defendants started responding to the court, the judge notes that she "became suspicious that there may have been a problem" and set a hearing to talk about it.

The April 20, 2011 hearing concluded with a decision that the case would be dismissed because the defendants had never been properly served with the Amended Complaint—and the window for doing so had expired. In addition, Righthaven would be on the hook for the legal fees in the case.

Those fees were approved yesterday, and Righthaven owes $3,815 in fees and costs to the Randazza Legal Group—which has fought similar cases across the country but also handles some mass P2P lawsuits of its own. Righthaven complained that most of the attorney time being billed for was actually spent negotiating these fees, but the judge approved them anyway.

The problems here were of a technical/procedural nature, but far worse could be coming in the more substantial cases. Randazza's group also won a "fair use" finding last month in another Righthaven case, and they are now asking for $34,000. Given the standing issues that have plagued Righthaven—judges have found that the company didn't even have the copyrights needed to bring many of these suits—much more pain could be ahead. Given that the average Righthaven settlement was apparently a few thousand dollars, it wouldn't take many $30,000+ awards to wipe out the cash the company has earned in the last few years.