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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."
Enough for now...
Until Microsoft slides more money under the door...
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
I need to get me a piece of that. :-)
Go Illini!!!
You know, I think the Lawyers are on our side FOR ONCE. They are milking SCO dry. Anyway I could contact them so they would have to bill SCO? I know, lets SLASHDOT the Lawyer office, and make sure that they bill SCO.
Better be quiet, FBI might come knocking (*AGAIN*)
--sig fault--
Is he related to Darl?
Executioner puts cap on Darl McBride's head before throwing the switch......
After all, they need to save their cash for the money they'll loose when it comes to the countersuits after they loose. All in all, it's great to see SCO planning ahead.
I want first dibs on an official SCO ergonomic chair when the sell off comes around.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
SCO Caps Legal Expenses At $31 Million
Posted by timothy on Wednesday September 01, @10:08AM
from the nice-prime-number-of-millions dept.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
News.com story
This is less than encouraging
Sory on ./ in September
5 16246&tid=123&tid=88&tid=106
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/01/1
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
There WAS "talk" about the cap a month or two ago, but agreement was never reached.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
It may as well have been some secret snake oil formula at stake. I see the whole thing of the CEO of a small company setting up an unwinnable court case against IBM as a way to funnel funds into the family pockets. Stay tuned for SCO to implode and Darl to sue for what he can get from it's smoking corpse. If legal dogs chase, Darl will simply funnel the funds somewhere inaccessable, pretend he is bankrupt, and blame it all on those kids and their darn penguin destroying the American way.
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.
Darl McBride announced today that he would sell licenses to use his face on Halloween masks. The licenses will reportedly be available for $695.00 and come with a guarantee that you won't be sued.
...until he changes his mind.
Why do I keep seeing the Disney logo in that caldera logo? why doesnt Mickey Mouse sue them into oblivion?
IBM has over 400 people on the payroll who do nothing but look at other companies to sue for possible intellectual property infringement.
IBM fought the United States government for more than 20 fucking years to a stalemate in their antitrust case.
Taking on IBM is a little more crazy than taking on entire Chinese Army.
If SCOG can't get adequate representation because their counsel is distracted now that their fees aren't going to be paid, then an avalanche happens. The SCOG v Novell litigation surrounding copyright title slander goes in favor of Novell. Novell, ostensible owner of the copyright can then get sued by SCO, but there's a cap now and Novell has lots of cash remaining to burn on litigation. It also sets a precedent that Novell owns Unix copyrights. They manifest themselves through a fairly loyal GPL/FOSS follower, SuSE. Ipso facto, Novell faces down SCOG, Microsoft and Sun. Then they roll out the serious Microsoft busters in the form of ways to do FOSS-based services from the top down. Noorda will finally smile.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
And afterwards, Boies et al will be able to buy SCO outright, for all it will be worth. With plenty of change left over.
Any one else wonder if SCO is just setting themselfs an easy out later? I mean when this doesnt go SCOs way and they hit the cap all Darl has to say is 'We would have won if we had more time and money' then he keeps the shadow over linux serving his Micky$oft masters. Since this was never about making money only hurting linux, I suspect this is a winning stratgy in the end. All MS has to say is point to some shlep that buys up the reminants of SCO and say they can sue you, this was never settled. Lets hope SCO implodes and someone like IBM or Novell buys them for pennies on the dollar and kills this lawsuit business.
The above mentioned, Kevin McBride, is brother to Darl McBride acording to this Computer Shopper News article.
So even if Darl fails in his quest to sue every sentient being (and SCO dies), he will have kept lots of money in the family.
So this can go on approximately 1 1/2 times as long as it has so far? That's good news?
"I'll never forget the look on that poor monkey's face as it tried to put that cork back in." (from that pig joke)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I am continuously amazed at the ability of lawyers to run up huge bills. I've heard $200/hour quoted somewhere as an average, so I'll run with that, even though I know many charge way more. Someone else quoted 18 months of activity in the discussion above. I skipped a lot of assumptions, but that translates to about 60000 hours, which means 19 lawyers working 40 hour weeks, raking in about $600000 each ($400 K/year).
Does anyone know the actual number of lawyers involved or their rates and can anyone enlighten me about what other costs SCO is likely including in their figure of $12 million spent so far?
[From Yahoo Finance Posting by stdsoft0]:
Investors need to be very, very careful. The wording of the legal fee "cap" announcement is highly deceptive.
While it may sound good to the uninformed, the legal fee "cap" does nothing practical to help SCO with the legal expense problem. Taken together, the following statements from the 8-K filing are HIGHLY misleading:
Statement 1:
"For future legal fees, the Engagement Agreement will require SCO to pay to the Law Firms $2.0 million per quarter for each successive quarter beginning September 1, 2004 and ending December 1, 2005..."
Statement 2:
"SCO's purpose in entering into the Engagement Agreement was to limit the cash expenditures needed to pursue the SCO Litigation to approximately $31 million, until the litigation with IBM concludes."
Taken together, SCO is saying that the litigation with IBM will end by December 2005. The problem, though, is that only the FIRST round of court action with IBM will have concluded by 12/2005. For the sake of argument, consider the highly unlikely event that SCO wins some sort of favorable decision. The appellate process will have only just begun. The odds of a decision being sufficiently favorable to warrant additional equity investment is highly unlikely, and SCO will be out of cash. Further, SCO is likely to still be defending against counter-claims.
I've noticed this SCO litigation story not even making major news headlines anymore, and even here on slashdot the interest is tailing off. SCO is not going to win their case. That is fairly certain by now unless certain, uhm, vested interests *cough*new reelected friends of microsoft*cough* bring their weight to bare on the legal system. But I don't think that's going to happen, and if it does happen, expect many tech companies to simply pull up stakes and move outside the US.
In the time being, Linux is continuing to gain corporate and government mindshare all over the world. I don't think that all that many people really listen to MS paid for FUD tactics. The rate of Linux uptake speaks for itself.
Maybe someone should put a "cap" in SCO's ass instead!
> but that's also money that could have been invested in hiring software people to help improve their products
Most of the new money came to SCO from Baystar, Microsoft and Sun. I believe all 3 of these wanted SCO to put the hurt on IBM and Linux. None of these companies wanted SCO to develop any products. Baystar actually said it in no uncertain terms in several interviews they did.
> 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...
This was the plan but it never did happen this way. SCO ended up paying ~ $8mil. cash. We dont know why the lawyers did not want stock anymore. Maybe because they realized it was worth less than toilet paper in the end.
Funny thing is last year when Boies agreed to be paid in stock (it was flying high then) he said in the investor conference call that getting paid in stock is a bit unusual but they do it when they are confident of the direction of the company.
I wonder what changed?
Yesterday David Boies (SCO's lead attorney) was on the Ronn Owens show on KGO-AM, taking calls from listeners. The topic was supposed to be his new book, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to hear his justification for his horrible work with SCO. So I called and asked him.
He seemed a little daunted by my opening, in which I told him I had lost all respect for him. When faced with the question of "Why!?", he predictably said "everyone's entitled to a defense". Never mind that SCO's on the *offense*... His justification basically boiled down to the simple, "the courts will decide if SCO's claims are legitimate". In other words, he doesn't give a shit. He just wants the money, win or lose.
I have worked with attorneys before, more than once, and the ones I worked with didn't want a case unless it seemed somewhat meaningful, and definitely very winnable. The money was important, but reputation was moreso. Bad reputation translates to less money for the shortsighted, quite often.
I guess this simply shows he's a whore, moreso than most attorneys.