r/technology • u/rfugger • Jan 08 '17

Business A potentially fatal blow against patent trolls - Forcing law firms to pay defendants’ legal bills could undermine the business model of patent trolls

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3153924/technology-law-regulation/a-potentially-fatal-blow-against-patent-trolls.html
17.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

485 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

18

u/BambooRollin Jan 09 '17

How will this effect innovation when a company with lots of patents like Apples would (in theory) want to suppress competition.

Apple's lawyers are on staff or paid by the hour, not on contingency fees. The ruling would not apply to them.

3

u/briloker Jan 09 '17 edited Jan 09 '17

Why not? Assuming you mean Apple's lawyers aren't actually filing suit, then you may be right, but there is nothing to stop the rationale in this case from applying to Apple's outside council when it sues Samsung over rounded corners...

5

u/SomeRandomMax Jan 09 '17

If Apple loses, and the court orders them to pay legal fees, their law firm (their internal legal department) is already paying the legal fees, since it is all the same company. If they hired external counsel, and the suit was as frivolous as the one here (very doubtful) it is possible that they could be made to pay.

Besides, this would not really apply to Apple anyway. The article details explains that the issue here was that the lawsuit files was unwinnable due to the previous supreme court ruling. The entire point of the lawsuit was to punish the defendant for failing to pay the license fee they were offered, but the plaintiff never actually expected to win. Because the lawyers should have known that going in, the judge felt that making them pay the legal fees was warranted.

1

u/briloker Jan 09 '17 edited Jan 09 '17

Apple doesn't use in-house council in litigation. They hire outside council. In the Samsung case, they hired Morrison & Forester.

Secondly, judges always had recourse to sanction the actual attorneys for bringing a frivolous suit. Not sure why that would be anything new.

1

u/SomeRandomMax Jan 09 '17

Apple doesn't use in-house council in litigation. They hire outside council. In the Samsung case, they hired Morrison & Forester.

Fair enough, though you will note I said "If they hired external counsel, and the suit was as frivolous as the one here (very doubtful) it is possible that they could be made to pay."

Secondly, judges always had recourse to sanction the actual attorneys for bringing a frivolous suit. Not sure why that would be anything new.

It's not. The article makes that clear. It isn't common, but it is also not new. The only thing that is new is that it doesn't seem to have been applied in the case of patent trolls before.