“A court in California is considering sanctions against Samsung Electronics and its lawyers in view of concerns that the external counsel may have shared confidential information from Apple with Samsung, according to a court document,” John Ribeiro reports for IDG News Service.
“‘Having finally crawled out from under the boxes, it appears to the undersigned that if anything was breached, it was this court’s protective order, and that sanctions against Samsung and its attorneys are warranted,’ noted U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division, in a ruling Friday,” Ribeiro reports. “Apple provided the information to Samsung’s law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan during the discovery phase of a lawsuit in California in which Apple was awarded damages of $1.05 billion against Samsung. Judge Lucy Koh vacated $450 million in damages, and ordered a retrial to recalculate damages which comes up Tuesday.”
Read more in the full article here.
“Having finally having crawled out from under the boxes…” What does he mean by that? That there were a lot of boxes of documents that needed to be reviewed? The last article on this topic said that Judge Grewal deemed that there was no reason for sanctions. Is this a reversal?
Reading the full article has provided the missing information. It still seems confusing to me though. How is that there’s any question as to whether sanctions are warranted? Of course they’re warranted. I love the excuse given, that neither of the two parties in the negotiations spoke English as a first language. There may have been a miscommunication. Kind of hard to miscommunicate to that degree, isn’t it?
Treachery draws blood in any language.
It is the proper scope of the USGovt. to protect IP laws according to the basic tenet of patents laid out in the constitution, otherwise our laws become just toilet paper thrown away.
Hopefully the courts are going to be more diligent in these cases.
The smoking gun: “Samsung’s outside counsel posted the expert report on an FTP (file transfer protocol) site that was accessible by Samsung staff, and emailed instructions for accessing the site, which over 50 Samsung employees including licensing executives are said to have accessed, Judge Grewal noted in the October ruling.”
The BS defense: “In a hearing, Samsung’s counsel repeatedly “denied even one violation of the protective order, asserting that such a violation can only occur willfully.””
The take away: The court’s protective order was ignored; inadequate measures were taken. Willful or no: ignorance of the law is no defense of a crime.
The right thing: This is an egregious act that undermines the court and justice. Samsung and its agents — including lawyers and all culpable employees or other parties– should face sanctions, revocation of legal licenses, substantial fines — both corporate and individual — and even imprisonment.
Samsung and its representatives should be dealt with severely. The deserve no benefit of any doubt in any court worldwide. They have proven themselves untrustworthy and should be dealt with accordingly. They are the corporate equivalent of a sociopath: they will do and say anything necessary to get what they want.
Samsung will argue that English is not our main language so we did not understand. Please forgive us.😉
Almost two decades ago a company for whom I worked at the time was involved in litigation where Quinn Emanuel was representing the other side. The Quinn Emanuel attorney kept filing extraneous crap after extraneous crap after extraneous crap to the extent that the judge formally issued a stop order on it. The Quinn Emanuel attorney kept at it. The judge sanctioned him personally for what our attorney said was a very, very large amount (didn’t seem like much to me as compared to what we were paying our law firm).
Seems Quinn Emanuel has not learned its lesson.
And, with regard to “English is not our primary language”: Quinn Emanuel is a U.S. law firm. They are the supervising firm. It is their responsibility to make 100% sure that all the attorneys involved, U.S. or otherwise, fully and completely understand all the rule with regard to evidence — or Quinn Emanuel should make sure that those attorneys don’t get access to restricted information.
Sanction them all! Hitting each and every firm (and some individuals) with stiff sanctions (fines) will be the only thing that changes their tactics.
You would think the American business press would be screaming this from the rooftops. The Criminal Enterprise known as Samsung needs to be beaten like a rented mule, fined harshly, and the same for their lawyers.
Mules, rented or otherwise, should not be beaten. Samsung, on the other hand, is fair game.