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Google In Battle With Its Own Lawyers
An anonymous reader writes "Google is at daggers end with a law firm it's been using since 2008, after discovering that lawyers in the law firm, named Pepper Hamilton LLP, were representing a patent licensing business that sued Google's Android partners last month. Google has claimed that Pepper Hamilton LLP never provided notice that it was hired by Digitude Innovations LLC, the firm that filed patent infringement complaints against Google's business allies."
We're talking lawyers here.
A bullet may have your name on it, but artillery is addressed to " Whom It May concern"
Never, never trust a lawyer.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
google has the finances to buy out entire u.s. legal system. why have not they set up their own shark team yet ? ............
really. the way silicon valley takes these threats to the digital age - like copyright/big media, patent trolls etc, anti-net neutrality etc - is WAY too carefree and lighthearted. even, totally oblivious.
for example, sopa/pipa thwarted, another is being cooked, acta already being pushed, and silicon valley is not doing shit.
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If that happened in my state and Google wanted to push it to the end, that firm could lose its firm license and the lawyers in charge could lose their licenses too.
But then again, my state takes conflicts of interest very seriously.
But the conflict occurred while the file was already open!
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It sounds like this law firm just violated Model Rule 1.7(a)(1), which is concurrently representing adverse clients. Someone's getting in trouble with the state bar...
There's no conflict; the lawyer's interests are perfectly consistent.
Plus, they were probably using Windows Notepad, which almost never seems to be deterred by that sort of thing when it opens a file. It's like it has...connections...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
looks like google will have to search for a new law firm.
I'm sure the Nazgul are free post SCO.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I would assume when you speak to a lawyer or a law firm that there is confidentiality.
If they are representing Google, yet at the same time suing them and passing confidential documents back and forth to the litigant that is acting not in accordance to good faith, representing the interests of the client, nor respecting the confidentiality.
I am no lawyer here but this sounds serious and I wonder if they can be debarred? It would not surprise me if this patent troll used that company on purpose for discovery to gain an advantage to sue. Very slimy indeed if that is the case and evil.
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The lawyers promised to do no evil!
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
For a company full to the brim with extraordinarily smart and gifted people, Google sure is being.. less than cunning as of late. Sure, they may succeed, despite themselves, eventually, but fuck, it looks bad. The numerous screw-ups with Google+ come to mind, and then letting Microsoft collect "taxes" from nearly all Android licensees (and Google just sitting around with its dick in hand) and now this.
I look at these apparent mistakes, and kind of hope there is some diabolic plan in place at Google, but the more I observe, the more it looks like good-old stupidity taking hold.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
How do I know?
All the stars are still there.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Dump them & move on. Don't waste effort on the parasites.
If there were no criminal charges, then surely that implies there wasn't as much evidence in the second case. Or there were circumstances that lead the authorities to believe they wouldn't get a conviction.
So why would it be strange that the bar punishment would also be at a lower level (they don't have the work of the criminal prosecutors to provide them the grounds for a ore severe punishment after all).
That's just Notepad is a fucking badass and isn't afraid of anything. Open up them locked files, busting a cap in them handles.
Basic conflict-checking should be mostly an automated process. The existing off-the-shelf software has conflict-checking built in, that searches your client database when you open the file.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
No - but it should be!
The differences, of course.
First, there's no history of violence against lawyers. There's never been (to my knowledge) a lawyer genocide, or a lawyer slavery. Remarks about racial discrimination, even in jest, are at best uncomfortable because there was once some sincerity to it.
Second, people cannot choose their race. I did not choose to be Caucasian. But people can, with very few exceptions, choose their profession - I chose to become a programmer, lawyers chose to become lawyers.
That's why it's funny. Because there's none of the uncomfortable realness that comes with race-based jokes.
* Except NYCL!
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You trusted us.
No honour amongst thieves.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Don't you just hate it when you strengthen a system, like patents, and it gets worse, and you strengthen it even more, and it gets worse, and you strengthen it still more, and it gets worse?
Psst -- Google, Apple, Motorola, Microsoft, IBM -- come here, I want to tell you something.
When the machine that you have built is moving too much revenue from the producers to the inventors; you can fix it by making it move less revenue from the producers to the inventors. When producing for the customer is paying less and less, and having lawyers and patents is paying more and more, and it is leading to wild legal thickets that make it unattractive to produce things for the customer, the system is out of balance. Much like copyright, the answer to a malfunctioning patent system is not always stricter patents. Sometimes the answer is weaker patents. You should be able to see that pretty clearly from where you are standing. Just open your damned eyes.
You are getting hoist by your own petard. Wake up and figure it out, already. You own the government now, so we can't do anything to help you. You've got to tell the legislators you own to cut back on patent strength, or you -- and all of us, not that you give a shit -- but you are going to lose all you have built.
Ask yourself this: Are we having more problems with companies not bothering to come up with cool new patentable things? Or are we having more problems with companies squabbling over who is allowed to build which things? If the bigger problem is the latter, it means we need to reduce the rate of revenue flow or we will all lose. It is actually a pretty easy thing to control through patent policy -- strengthen it, more revenue flows, weaken it, less revenue flows; like a faucet -- you just have to open your eyes and recognize the problem.
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I don't see a hatred against all lawyers, but a general distrust of the industry and a hatred of bad/immoral/etc lawyers.
NYCL is fairly popular here, as are the folks at Groklaw (OK, P.J. is actually a paralegal). The others (patent troll lawyers, Jack Thompson, etc) are surely unpopular here, but IMHO in most cases their lack of popularity is rather warranted.
Uhh, isn't that grounds for disbarment? I thought it was basically illegal to represent both parties within the same lawfirm, it being a conflict of interest and all. It was my impression that it was grounds for disbarment if a lawyer knowingly did that. I would find it incredibly hard to believe that the firm did not know they were representing Google and also suing them... that just seems virtually impossible.
It's like the episode of Seinfeld where Jerry's dentist is making Jewish jokes, and Jerry starts making dentist jokes. Then the dentist gets all upset because his "people" (the dentists) are oppressed, and Kramer calls Jerry an "anti-dentite". Classic.
It's an oblique Shakespeare reference.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Can you say conflict of interest?
In my experience lawyers exist to extract money from clients.
When I told my lawyer that I needed a EULA for an iPhone / iPad app and gave him a list of concerns, he called me back 15 minutes later to say that Apple's App Store EULA covers third parties like me and that my listed concerns are covered there. That I didn't need my own EULA.
There must be something wrong with my lawyer, he served me well rather than extract the maximum amount of money. YMMV.
I'm replying to the stole $30,000 comment, not the details of the story...
How about Dewey Cheatem and Howe - Attorneys at Law
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey,_Cheatem_%26_Howe)
First, there's no history of violence against lawyers. There's never been (to my knowledge) a lawyer genocide,
When you point things like that out, it really makes me depressed about the nature of humanity and society.
I mean... why the hell not?!
take the giant portrait pic in your homepage down dammit.
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taking down whole mafiaa out is not necessary. what's needed is to break the cartel. and from among those, the only ones needed are the ones holding the news hostage. take out news corp, and you got not only a major news channel which was previously used for attacks on internet, but also a major hollywood propaganda corporation in the mix.
just using one major news channel to broadcast the opposition perspective in these copyright shit, would totally balance and offset the easy and surefire attempts the media cartels were doing.
see, even the sopa thing was not broadcast longer than 2 minutes or so in these channels, and that is after the shit hit the fan. if, news corp or another news channel was owned by silicon valley, and started broadcasting about sopa 2 months ago, there wouldnt even be a sopa hitting the house floors.
in addition realize that you dont need to buy entirety of a corporation to control it. news corp is worth 50 bn in total, everything included. just google's cash is 44 billion. acquiring controlling shares of news corp, would be enough, and google has more than enough cash at hand to do it.
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nerds are on the edge of ruling the world, and the only thing that is preventing them are the media dinosaurs ?
most of what was 'nerd' 5 years ago has become the cultural norm already. all that is left are the old ways of doing things. in media, economics and politics. the new culture had half-taken over media already, but they are fighting back to keep the status quo.
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...Stalin had no use for Lawyers.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
In 1958, my grandfather worked for Purina and was severely injured falling four stories down an elevator shaft. The elevator had no doors. He was a complete invalid until he died ten years later. His and my grandmother's lives were living hells.
Grandma spoke to a few lawyers in the area, all of whom told her she she had no case, despite Purina's obvious negligence.
My dad found out later that Purina had every lawyer in the state on its payroll. It's disgusting what lawyers who are owned by soulless corporations will do for their dirty money.
Free Martian Whores!
This law firm is facing a very serious charge. They're going to have to figure out how to spin this to avoid admitting the information google gave them wasn't used in prosecuting the Android mobile partners. Some people are going "But,but, they're HUUUUUGEEE!" and that is true and it may not mean a thing for people like us who use their services and then our opponent uses them because we're so small. The sheer size of Google and it's representative within the firm means it was inevitable that if they were to take on a client that opposed Google's operations that the information was easily available and inevitably looked at by somebody, it's too tempting. This is a major issue that while it may not end in disbarment it will end badly for some mid-level attorney that failed to check for conflicts.