Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Apple: “Betrayed by its own law firm?”

Lawyer in Apple’s law firm turns out to have been secretly advising and investing in patent-holding entity (repped by Hagens Berman) preparing a legal onslaught against Apple. “Why didn’t Morgan Lewis … see an ethical problem in letting one of its partners invest in a patent troll, especially one specially designed to target one of the firm’s big clients? And how many other big-firm lawyers are entwined with ‘start-ups’ that are actually holding companies, created to attack the very corporations they are supposed to be defending?” [Joe Mullin, Ars Technica via @tedfrank]

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5 Comments

  • Was that wrong?

  • Doesn’t the fault here lie with the lawyer rather than the firm? It appears that he engaged in this activity on his own, not at the firm’s behest and without its knowledge.

  • (I.e., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RvNS7JfcMM&t=0m20s )

  • Might the wayward attorney have been corrupted, in part, by the aggrieved client? Admittedly Apple, unlike a classic “troll,” is a *practicing* entity. Nevertheless, they have been pushing the envelope with “innovative” patent lawsuits to hamper and shut down competition, eg against those using Google’s “Android” system.

  • Why should the ethics of Apple’s lawyers be any better than that of its other advisors?

    NATIONAL REVIEW
    JUNE 3, 2013 8:00 AM
    EPA Honors Fake Employee
    Just when you thought the federal government couldn’t get more ridiculous
    By Eliana Johnson

    “Richard Windsor may be the most famous Environmental Protection Agency employee. Oddly, he does not exist. ‘Windsor’ is the e-mail alias that Lisa Jackson, former head of the EPA and now an environmental adviser to Apple, used to correspond with environmental activists and senior Obama-administration officials, among others.

    Windsor, we have learned, was also an employee of significant achievement. Documents released by the agency in response to a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that, for three years, the EPA certified Windsor as a “scholar of ethical behavior.” [in 2010, 2011 & 2012]

    The agency also documented the nonexistent Windsor’s completion of training courses in the management of e-mail records, cyber-security awareness, and what appears to be a counter-terror initiative that urges federal employees to report suspicious activity.”

    see the rest of the article at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/349934/epa-honors-fake-employee-eliana-johnson

    • By wfjag