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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."
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.
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.