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SCO Puts a Cap on its Legal Expenses
prostoalex writes "The SCO Group reached an agreement with the lawyers to limit the litigation expenses to $31 million until the IBM lawsuit is resolved. The company already paid $12 million to Boies Schiller & Flexner LLP, Kevin McBride and Berger Singerman, which provide legal services to the company."
I thought SCO were a bunch of scam artists. Looks like the lawyers are the ones running the scam. $31 million for a clearly fraudulent case. Nice.
Surely it must be hard for these guys to go home and sleep at night?
fifth sigma, inc.
If SCOG can't get adequate representation because their counsel is distracted now that their fees aren't going to be paid, then an avalanche happens. The SCOG v Novell litigation surrounding copyright title slander goes in favor of Novell. Novell, ostensible owner of the copyright can then get sued by SCO, but there's a cap now and Novell has lots of cash remaining to burn on litigation. It also sets a precedent that Novell owns Unix copyrights. They manifest themselves through a fairly loyal GPL/FOSS follower, SuSE. Ipso facto, Novell faces down SCOG, Microsoft and Sun. Then they roll out the serious Microsoft busters in the form of ways to do FOSS-based services from the top down. Noorda will finally smile.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I wonder if this is a neat way of siphoning dollars into the Darl Family Trust? It has been obvious for a while that Darl has no interest in making money from selling software, so what angle are they playing?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Taking on IBM is a little more crazy than taking on entire Chinese Army.
Yeah, no kidding.
The Chinese army has nukes, but nobody will use nukes because they destroy so many lives and businesses, wipe out economies, and make areas uninhabitable for decades.
IBM has lawyers, and everyone uses lawyers as a first strike, despite the fact that they destroy so many lives and businesses, wipe out economies, and make areas uninhabitable for decades.
The question is, is it better to elect a rich businessman from a large multinational, or a lawyer? I would have rather voted for a plumber, they take all your money, but at least leave you with a working shitter.
How the hell do you turn all this legal negativity into a product or service to sell? Amazingly SCO lawyers did it! Go to http://www.sco.com, under product & services you see
"SCO vs. IBM"
"SCO vs. Autozone"
"SCO vs. Novell"
You know your lawyers are good when they have convinced the webmaster to advertise their lawsuits just like any other products.
I know you're kidding but it's still a sad commentary on the way the legal profession has undermined the economy. Those lawyers have done nothing for SCO and yet they have greatly enriched themselves from shareholders' money.
And who do you blame for this? The first response to jump to mind should be "whatever jackass decided to pay the lawyers so much for such a hopeless lawsuit". An old saw in the legal profession is that the reason lawyers are such assholes, is that clients are such assholes (see my profile for more about my stake in the whole debate). A lawyer is the agent of his client's interests in the legal realm; simply that and nothing more.
Here's a question for some legal expert. Since Boies et al were paid in stock a while back, they are now a major stockholder in SCO, 25% as I recall. I wonder if they can therefore be sued by any parties who have a grievance against SCO?
No. As another poster said in this thread, the very point of setting up a corporation is to establish a firewall for legal liability. There are a couple of recourses, though:
1) If you think the lawsuit is truly malicious and has no plausible basis in fact, you could sue SCO et al for bringing a frivolous suit, but you would have to have standing (i.e., actually be injured yourself). You could accomplish that several ways, but being an IBM principal or employee, or someone else whose livelihood "depends" on Linux would be a good start.
2) If you are a shareholder of SCO, you could bring an action against the board of directors, personally as individuals and in their role as directors, and probably McBride and other "wayward" executives. The basis for this would be that the management of SCO is doing things that are actually against its shareholders' best interests (as confirmed by the miserable performance of SCO stock), and thus violating securities regulations.
See how it always comes back to the company, not the lawyers? It's because they can only be as mean as SCO tells them to be. Actually, I'm kind of surprised that someone hasn't tried #2 yet; I guess there's always the hypothetical possibility they'll prevail and make some money, but it seems much more likely that they're tilting at windmills and wasting money that would be much better spent on, oh, R&D or something.
Unfortunately, one of the ethical standards is that lawyers must represent their clients to the best of their ability without stepping across legality lines (misleading the judge/jury/opposing council, breaking the law, etc).
Much of the time, this involves working technicalities in the law and other things that many people would consider immoral.
Like many people view defense lawyers as scum because they routinely put together defenses that work because the evidence was poisonous or another reason and not because their client is innocent, and thus get even murderers off scott-free. I don't view those types of things as necessarily bad, but a lot of people will put justice for that individual's acts above justice in the process.
Those lawyers have done nothing for SCO and yet they have greatly enriched themselves from shareholders' money. Granted some of that money came from outfits with questionable morals themselves, like The Canopy Group, but that's also money that could have been invested in hiring software people to help improve their products and their competitive position in the market. SCO was once a reputable company, after all.
I'm guessing the lawyers are in the same position a coder or a webmaster is in when their client suggests something highly stupid, highly bass-ackwards.
You tell them the straight dope.
If they refuse to listen, you do it their way, and bill them.
Its a professional's responsibility to give their expert advice to a client. But if the client refuses to listen to that advice, then bill the client for doing it their way. Its the client's responsibility to listen to the advice and make the decision.
To use an analogy -- if you are a broker and your client wants to buy SCOX tomorrow, you might explain the potential problems with that purchase (mainly, IBM will crush them, resulting in plummeting stock prices). If your client still wants to buy SCOX, then you take your commission on the trade, and wait for the inevitable phone call from your client asking you how you could have let them do something like that (unless SCOX shoots back up, then the phone call will be about how much brighter they are than you).
Sure the lawyers may be competent to some degree. However, there's some issues with the abilities of the CEO, the software engineers, the managers, and the rest of the disillusioned employees of the poor company.
Good lawyers. Yup. That's about all there is to SCO.
*Ahem* maybe
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
I consider good lawyers to be the equivalent of hackers --> they hack the legal code that this society was built to, to make their point.
Morals and ethics are relative, but hats off to anyone who can tackle the finer points of law to get things their way.
They're the real hackers of the society's fundamental principle - the law.
Their lawyers are right here: the legal activity is a service. And they do have a big, paying customer.
Even more, this service is their primary purpose these days.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
SCO is done for even if the case is a draw. They've proven that you're far more likely to be sued if you're already a customer of theirs than if you're not. So the easiest way to limit your liability with them is to never become a customer. Nice work, Darl.
Before deciding to become a lawyer, ask yourself the question: given how I feel about _users_, how would I feel about working with clients who are the kind of people who end up in expensive lawsuits and so, for the most part, are not friendly, cooperative individuals who get on well with other people. And demand that you listen to their idiotic ramblings and read their pathetic documents and, instead of laughing at them, take them seriously because they are paying? Because, don't forget, to be a hotshot lawyer you have big outgoings and you have to keep the cash flowing. And telling Mr. Moneybags to anglo saxon sexual intercourse(1) off because his case is piss(2) poor will soon result in a negative cashflow situation. So please, focus your ire on the honest businessmen of SCO who are spending the company funds on this stuff.
(1) Now the Christian Right is in charge, I think we need to be careful about using naughty words.
(2)But not when it comes to words from the Bible, of course.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
The problem is, if you want to sue someone for $3 billion, you have to pick someone who's got $3 billion.
The fact that they also have a legal department which covers the land masses of three major planets is just an unfortunate side effect.
John