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IBM is using Cravath of Cravath, Swaine & Moore as outside counsel on this case. Cravath is one of the most prestigous law firms in the country, typically hiring only from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. Vault.com ranks Cravath as the 2nd most prestigous law firm in NYC, behind Watchell. You can bet that Cravath is billing at least 500/hr per attorney on this case.

Can they get Cravath, Swaine and Moore to provide some input into the brief also? They've provided several wonderful briefs in the SCO vs IBM case. If anybody can present a watertight legal argument, CS&M can. I'm just a bit worried that the brief as it stands contains too much emotive language and spends too much time appealing to the judge's sense of "the greater good".

IANAL, but IMHO judges don't care about "the greater good" unless it's a claim before them; I expect this judge will ignore all the emotive arguments and get right down to the question of whether it's legal to award attorneys' fees to the defendant, including whether the appropriate standard for awarding has been met.

I also expect the judge to try very hard to make the narrowest possible ruling. Judges don't like setting precedents; the bigger the precedent, the less the judge likes it. This brief strikes right to the heart of the Adversary legal system, namely that poor defendants have little access to the courts and can be easily abused by rich plaintiffs. The judge will want to stay way clear of upsetting that status quo.

This is accomplished by sheer manpower. Cravath is a team operation - everything important, and most of the little stuff, gets checked by several different people. Cravath and IBM introduced the litigation support systems decades ago, and by now, they're wel integrated into the operation. Everything in the case goes in and gets indexed and linked.

Dumping a ton of documents on Cravath will not help your case. Buildings will be filled with clerks, paralegals, and servers, until every document disclosed has been examined for anything that will help their side. If there's a contradiction in there, it will be found and used.

It's not impossible to beat Cravath, but you have to have a strong case. Handwaving will not work. Opponents who try that will be shot down again and again by "You said that your company had never done that. But in document #B13549034, page 374, paragraph 5, your company admitted doing exactly that."

Since Cravath's approach is well known, it's surprising that Boies let SCO go forward with their bogus arguments. This case is consuming about 0.01% of IBM's revenue. They're not going to cave.

Actually, IBM is using two law firms on this case: Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Snell & Wilmer. While IBM does have a legal staff, most of its litigation is done by outside firms.

IBM's main attorneys are Cravath Swaine & Moore in NYC and a smaller firm (Snell & Wilmer) that has an office in Utah. Their inhouse counsel are of counsel. There is no possible way that this suit is costing IBM almost nothing. Even if IBM has Cravath on retainer (I'm not sure Cravath even takes retainers; IBM almost certainly doesn't have the Utah counsel on retainer), retainers aren't meant to pay for entire matters like this. Also, there is no amount of retainer that would pay for their defense in a case like this, especially for a firm like Cravath (which is one of the most prestigious (and expensive) law firms in the world).

/. loves IBM's attorneys now, but both firms on IBM's side are large (300+ attorneys) firms that will possibly, someday, be on the side that you don't approve of. Then, they will become "evil".