“Anyone following the Apple v. Samsung patent trial has noticed the frequency with which Koh, the U.S. district judge presiding over the case, has scolded lawyers from both sides,” Greg Sandoval reports for CNET.
“The most vivid example came last week, when Apple lawyers notified Koh that they wished to cram a large number of witnesses into the remaining few hours they had to make their arguments. This would have added to the mountain of paperwork and generated more work for Koh and her staff,” Sandoval reports. “‘Come on,’ Koh told Bill Lee, one of Apple’s lawyers. ‘You want me to do an order on 75 pages? Unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called.'”
Sandoval reports, “Koh is only 43, on the youngish side for a district judge, and not very experienced. She has been a federal judge for two years. Before that, she served two years as a California Superior Court Judge in Santa Clara. So as Koh prepares today to oversee final arguments in the case, a couple questions one might ask are these: did she know what she was doing, and did she mess anything up? The only things hanging in the balance are billions of dollars and possibly the future of the mobile phone and tablet businesses.”
“Koh handled patent and trade secret litigation for tech companies when she was a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in the mid 2000s. This part of her background raises the question that fans of Apple and Samsung have asked since the trial started: Is Koh biased? Does she have it in for one company or the other?” Sandoval reports. “In 2006, Koh was part of a team of McDermott lawyers that represented Creative Technology in a patent dispute against Apple, according to The Washington Post. The case was settled with Apple agreeing to pay Creative $100 million. Some Apple fans accused her of favoring South-Korea-based Samsung because she’s Korean… Nonsense, said Brian Love, a law professor at Santa Clara University. He points out that if Koh ‘were biased or had it for one company, she could have ruled against them on summary judgment.’ Instead, she is sending the case to the jury.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Judge Lucy Koh asks Apple’s attorneys if they’re ‘smoking crack’ – August 16, 2012