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Apple betrayed by its own law firm
- ajtaylor 13y agoI predict this is going to be as much fun to watch as the Prenda Law case!
- InternalRun 13y agoI certainly hope so...
- Steko 13y agotldr of various reactions to the troll looking for partners: Google: did not answer Nokia: sounded super interested
- hkmurakami 13y agoThey say that litigation is often a last ditch effort by companies that know that they are in trouble in the long run. Google and Nokia's respective behaviors certainly reflect their current predicaments accurately.
- chris_wot 13y agoOr they want to know who they are dealing with, and are reeling them in to find out more about who might sue them next.
- itg 13y agoSeems like it was one lawyer, which the firm then kicked out.
- ajtaylor 13y agoBut more interestingly, it appears that the law firm may have known about the activities of this lawyer and not done anything about it.
- hkmurakami 13y agoAnd so the lizard cuts off its tail to survive...
- DannyBee 13y agoYou have to remember these guys are lawyers, and so they represent what happened in whatever the best light to them is. IE when you read "He says he informed the firms general counsel about it", you may think this means "he emailed the firm's general counsel with details about a pending lawsuit he had against one of the clients". It may in fact mean "he texted the general counsel's broken cell phone at 3am while drunk, saying that he was suing someone that mattered, with half the words misspelled" This was an environmental litigator. One who should be disbarred for this but won't be.
- jacques_chester 13y agoMy reading is that what appears, on the allegations, to be a breach of fiduciary duty by various lawyers and firms will give Apple some more space for tactical manoeuvering. They can use it to delay or restart various aspects of the case. But it won't necessarily break the patent in question. Eventually it'll come to trial. (IANAL, TINLA)
- invisible 13y agoIt very well may be that this what you said and to make the McAleeses incur more litigation costs. Sadly, the only way to fight these "troll patent companies" (as Jennifer McAleese states) is to wrap the cases up in endless movements, discovery, witnesses, etc. so that some minor detail comes to light eventually.
- sidcool 13y agoCan this act be called unethical? This is bad. Using law for profit is like pimping.
- rayiner 13y ago> And how many other big-firm lawyers are entwined with "start-ups" that are actually holding companies, created to attack the very corporations they are supposed to be defending? Considering you can't even by stock at a large firm without clearing it, I'm going to guess: almost nobody. There is no way mlb knew about the nature of this business. Firms survive on reputation. Nobody hires a firm with a bad reputation for keeping client confidences. Why would the other partners risk their income so this guy's wife could make a buck? It makes no sense, especially considering how much money there is in representing apple as a repeat customer.
- DannyBee 13y agoI have to agree. Most of this story is the typical "try to conflict out any law firm that opposes you by any means necessary" that large companies practice. The only interesting twist is that they may have a valid point for once :)
- unreal37 13y agoHe notified the lead counsel at his employer before and after suing Apple. So the question is, why did he still work there until recently?
- DannyBee 13y agoThe article does not say this. It says "He had told Morgan Lewis' general counsel at the time about the lawsuit" It doesn't cite a source. The rest around it is in quotes, so it's not clear if this is the article author's interpretation of what John McAleese's said, or the article author's personal view. If it's the former, you have to be very very careful, because they are all lawyers. The literal wording is "He had told Morgan Lewis' general counsel at the time about the lawsuit". It does not say "He had told Morgan Lewis' general counsel at the time of his involvement in the lawsuit". He could have emailed the general counsel saying "Hey, it looks like apple got sued again. I bet we'll make some money from them on this!" etc
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mtgx 13y agoThis is certainly a bad thing that shouldn't happen to any company, but at the same time I can't help but think this is some kind of poetic justice Apple is receiving for all the "patent trolling" they've done over the past few years with some very bogus claims. Maybe karma is real. When you breed a certain kind of culture in the industry or in your company, this is what you get out of it.
- danielrakh 13y agoIt's not considered trolling when you're defending your own products. What do you think patents are for?
- gilgoomesh 13y agoIf this is karma, it's karma that travelled backwards in time and attacked Apple 3 years before any of the patent law suits Apple filed against other companies in the current mobile device IP war. So no, it's not karma or poetic justice. It's just another symptom of the same underlying problem of patents and the ridiculous farce it has made out of the tech business.
- unreal37 13y agoThe lawsuit was filed in 2012. How is that "3 years before" Apple became a patent bully themselves?
- lostlogin 13y agoI may be misinterpreting, but I believe this is referring to when the conflict of interested started, not when the lawsuit was filed. I could be wrong as I'm reading the article as stating that the mess started in 2007 (days after iPhone release) when is a lot longer than 3 years.
- namank 13y agoThey invented the stuff they protected. The system, as it stands, only works if the owner of the patent/trademark/IP takes step to defend it.
- chris_wot 13y agoSounds like this lawyer is going to find it hard to find work. Ever again.
- DannyBee 13y agoYou are confused. He is an environmental litigator. He will wait 5 months, and then be a partner somewhere else, at worst, on a different coast. No one will care. At most, he'll be censured. But he's from their philadelphia office, so my guess is PA will do nothing. If he's licensed in Maryland, he may face real problems (Maryland takes this kind of thing very seriously in a way most states do not).
- yekko 13y agoIf only we devs can learn how to do this, we'd actually could become rich.
- smsm42 13y agoYou're experiencing observation bias. Crime sometimes does pay, but in many cases it does not, and these cases are usually aren't reported as widely because they are routine and uninteresting. If you try to abuse your position for personal profit, you might get rich, but most probable outcome would be you initially get somewhat rich and then ruin the rest of your life. And you only have one. Do you think it's worth it?
- dba7dba 13y agolive by patent trolling, die by patent trolling...
- jacquesm 13y agoThis guy should be disbarred, he and his wife should end up paying Apple damages to cover all the costs in all lawsuits that this company was involved in. Good luck getting any of that to happen. As for the schadenfreude in this thread: I don't like Apple much, they've done a lot of bad things in the last couple of years but I see absolutely no reason to wish any of this on them.
- jonknee 13y agoThat seems pretty harsh considering the attorney in question didn't work on anything remotely related to Apple (or even patents). There are 1,300 attorneys at his firm, I'm sure you could find a conflict with nearly any investment. Now if he were billing to Apple's account while also running the lawsuits that he was defending, that would be something worth discussion. Alas, he was not.
- DanLivesHere 13y agoI've only read the linked-to article once, but this doesn't seem nearly as bad as it sounds (minus the patent trolling aspect). Here's how I think it happened -- and, for sake of clarity, I worked at a large-ish law firm, have a bunch of friends who worked in the huge ones, and even know a partner at the named firm. 1) Lawyer and his wife start (with others) a company. Company invents something (kind of) and lawyer, being a lawyer, files for a patent. 2) Someone else comes along and creates something kind of/sort of like what they did. They have a patent so they look at suing the other company. 3) Lawyer works at a law firm which represents the target company. The law firm has 1,300 lawyers and two dozen offices around the world. He tells his firm's general counsel about the issue, likely to set up "chinese walls" as to not run afoul of any ethical obligations. Note that he's kind of stuck otherwise -- his company is going to be adverse to the law firm's client, and he's stuck in the middle. 4) When the firm's client hears about this, they freak the eff out and demand that the attorney in question be fired. He's fired.
- ChuckMcM 13y agoThat is pretty egregious. I wonder if there is going to be a great "cleansing" and anyone not completely spotless in the big firms will find themselves on the outs. Something strange about how long it persisted though. I've worked with one of the big firms as an expert, Quinn Emmanuel, and they were very very strict about communications. I presumed this was standard practice.