Google Files Bill of Costs for Oracle to Pay - $4,030,669

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120706111715256

by lightspot • 14 years ago

102 67 14 years ago

dmix• 14 years ago

When I was a kid, I read comics or heard jokes where the punchline was about everyones unanimous hatred for lawyers, I was always a bit confused.

But witnessing the last few yrs in the tech industry (in addition to politics and divorce law), it's become very apparent to me why thats the case.

BadassFractal• 14 years ago

I still don't see how the lawyers are the bad guys here. The company knows that the country's laws might allow it to weaken the competition. It wants to avail itself of that option. The laywers are just the executors of that action, the messengers if you will.

They're certainly happy to make a buck from the process, but unless they're the ones to actually create the laws and keep them in place despite their ridiculousness, they are not exactly to blame.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

They benefit from the current situation and their colleagues write the laws, so I don't imagine we'll see hordes of lawyers clamoring to change the status quo any time soon.

zdw• 14 years ago

The problem is money.

Large companies can use lawyers to get things like special taxation benefits ("if we build our factory here, can we get a tax break?") or to stamp out competition from smaller companies through patent lawsuits, etc.

Saying that lawyers who participate in such actions is neutral is like saying that the tobacco companies are neutral with regards to cancer caused by smoking. You can't have a system without it's facilitators.

That said, I know and work with a whole lot of very nice lawyers who, to my knowledge, aren't scummy.

trobertson• 14 years ago

(Over) Simplified:

It's primarily lawyers (or at least, law school graduates) that make the laws, and they are also the ones profiting from ridiculous cases. It's up to lawyers to fix the mess that the lawyers made, that the lawyers are profiting from.

Obviously, only lawyers are happy with the situation.

As I said, this is a simplification. But it is too close to the truth for most people, and so most people dislike lawyers for "screwing things up".

potatolicious• 14 years ago

> "they are not exactly to blame."

Oh hell naw.

If someone leaves their car unlocked sitting by the curb with the keys in the ignition, is it right to steal it? The fact that someone has (stupidly or otherwise) created a situation that is easy to take advantage of in no way excuses the person that exploits it.

The fact that we have creating a patent and copyright law situation that borders on the absurd is one thing, people actively seeking to profit from this sorry state of affairs are as guilty as they come.

noonespecial2• 14 years ago

Here's a viewpoint that's even more scary than a bunch of villainous lawyers out to take advantage of the poor sheeple: The lawyers, the accountants, the CEO's, even judges and juries are just out working hard, trying the best they can to get along in life. None of them are particularly scummy. The rottenness is just an emergent property.

Lawyers just happen to live on the fault-lines of the tectonic plates of greed and self interest.

nazgulnarsil• 14 years ago

It isn't just an emergent property. When you undermine contract law and private property rights the whole system turns to shit.

Libertarians complain loudly about things like guns and drugs, but the erosion of the backbone of an economy is a much more insidious problem.

SquareWheel• 14 years ago

What are the chances that they will actually receive this?

tokenadult• 14 years ago

What are the chances that they will actually receive this?

An order of the court will determine the final award of costs. Both sides get to argue with the court about what's a reasonable award, but the judge decides, and I can't imagine that Oracle wouldn't follow the court's order (as it can well afford to do). Probably Google is initially asking for far more than it actually expects to get after the judge reviews the bill of costs.

jswanson• 14 years ago

Whatever the result, the lawyers always win.

This is pocket change for Oracle. The real set back to them is the result of the case.

And though it's good to see the aggressor in one of these lawsuits actually lose, it's saddening to think that if Oracle or a pure patent troll went after a company without 4 million to pay for a defensive suit, they would have won.

skystorm• 14 years ago

Note that this does not actually include the attorneys' fees, though.

nwmcsween• 14 years ago

It's nice to see Oracle reinventing it self into SCO

ComputerGuru• 14 years ago

It hasn't, though. Larry Ellison has shown time and time again that Oracle is just about the bottom dollar. SCO was just a patent troll, but in Ellison's Oracle, patent trolling/litigation is just another "wing" of the business of making big bucks. Oracle did the math and thought it would be worth the risk/investment of taking this all the way in anticipation of a possible payout on the scale of billions of dollars, and it didn't pan out. That's what makes this all the more annoying: this isn't their core business model, they're not SCO, but they choose to pursue this anyway.

taligent3• 14 years ago

I don't think you know much about Oracle. Aggressively defending their assets through the courts is something Oracle has a long, long history of. Sometimes they win. Sometimes they lose. But they almost never just let things slide.

Pretty sure Larry is wearing his kimono with swords by his side when he's making the decision to "go to war".

andyjsong2• 14 years ago

Man... I gotta get back into economic consulting... $986,978 in expert witness fees.

quink• 14 years ago

That's probably one percent of the total lawyering costs. Maybe get into that :P

andyjsong2• 14 years ago

>That's probably one percent of the total lawyering costs. Maybe get into that :P

I don't think you know how much expert witnesses charge and what they do.

grellas• 14 years ago

The cost bill filed by Google underscores the intensity of this case and shows that we caught only surface glimpses of what surely were day-to-day firefights keeping the lawyers and their minions going round-the-clock for an intense year's worth of fighting.

A "cost bill" is not a bill for the attorneys' fees incurred in a case. Under U.S. rules, the parties bear their own legal fees in most cases (and that is the case here).

But federal court rules do permit a prevailing party to recover from the losing party necessary costs incurred in dealing with document production and similar matters in the litigation. The out-of-pocket bill here (not including attorneys' fees) for Google to filter through 97 million documents and to produce just over 3 million of them after careful assessment and screening: about $2.9 million (mostly paid to electronic discovery service providers, who surely found full-time employment in this case during this past year).

The bulk of the remaining bill for costs consists of nearly $1 million paid to expert witnesses for their assistance in helping to prepare and present Google's case.

In a case like this, Google's attorneys' fees had to run at least $10 million per month, at least during the intense phases of the case. I would estimate, then, that total attorneys' fees in the case easily exceeded $100 million and may well have done so for Google alone.

Big Law may be in the doldrums today in general but a case like this clearly offers a big payday. The law firms here were all exemplary and undoubtedly earned it. Still, the cost is staggering to contemplate for the casual outside observer.

cookiecaper7• 14 years ago

They did not earn it. Lawyers charge exorbitant prices because they can -- they have you by the balls, and you don't really have an option not to pay them -- not because their services are actually worth $100 million+. I've admired your posts for years here on HN, but it's not just staggering to a "casual observer"; it's staggering to anyone with a sense of decency and propriety.

Cushman5• 14 years ago

Out of curiosity, how much would you bid to reproduce some tens of millions of pages of documents in such a way that you would be willing to testify before a judge that every single one was true and accurate?

(Considering that the judge will not take your word for it, how much should you set aside to pay someone else to go through it all and check your work?)

noonespecial2• 14 years ago

Lawyers may have Joe Ordinary "by the balls" in his divorce case, but I'm quite sure that no one has Google by the oo's. When it comes to law, scale makes a quantitative difference. A case this size is 100% politics and its manipulating the precedents for an entire country. Its damn near diplomacy.

"Big Law" is suffering these days. Law firms lined up for this one by the trainload, Google picked the best of the best and paid what they thought it was worth to them.

taligent3• 14 years ago

What a hypocritical remark. Someone with decency and proprietary does not call into question an entire profession of people. The law profession attracts a lot of extremely intelligent and honorable people. Unfortunately like any profession the bad ones tend to make the most noise.

I sure as hell can't imagine many people with the intellectual rigor capable of turning the staggering volume of documents into a single, compelling argument.

pg• 14 years ago

The high rates that top lawyers get paid are simply market rates. We pay them too. Cheap lawyers are not a bargain.

Decency and propriety? What do you even mean by that? That you think the proper rate for legal work should be lower than the current market rate? What basis do you have for such a claim?

djloche2• 14 years ago

"They did not earn it. _______ charge exorbitant prices because they can -- they have you by the balls, and you don't really have an option not to pay them -- not because their services are actually worth ______."

I've heard this sort of statement from just about anyone looking from the outside into any other profession.

Developers, Photographers, Architects, Plumbers, Lawyers whoever don't actually earn their rates. Their services aren't actually worth $$$. They charge exorbitant prices because they can. Sorry - it's all hogwash.

Someone's services are worth something to you, otherwise you wouldn't be paying them. It's a business decision. You can pay to have your car fixed so you can get to work, you can pay to get your stove fixed so you can cook, you can pay to have your toilet fixed so your feces go to the sewage treatment plant instead of spewing all over your floor, you can pay to have a building designed so you can build it or live in it, you can pay for a non-stop flight so you can be there in time for the meeting with PG, and so on.

Google made $2.89B profit on $10.645B revenue in their most recently reported quarter. An additional $14M in legal expenses per quarter is no doubt far less than they normally spend on a regular basis for legal. In fact, Google has no less than 70 openings for legal positions posted on their website.

~$4.5M a month in legal fees is an extraordinary sum to the average HN commenter (including me), it is not an extraordinary sum for a company the size of google, but merely a regular cost of doing business.

nopinsight• 14 years ago

I believe the loser of a court case, especially if they are the initiator, should foot the legal bills for both sides. At least this will offer small parties who are attacked by predatory lawsuit from a large party a fighting chance (with obvious risks), especially when the case is not warranted. Why is this not implemented in US law?

protomyth• 14 years ago

One reason it is not implemented is that it would stop most poor people from suing insurance companies. They have very deep pockets and the bill would be excessive, so the cost of trying to right a wrong would scare off most attorneys that would take the case. Polluters is another class of case that generally fits into this.

Tort reform is needed, but automatic loser pay works to the advantage of big companies.

sgift• 14 years ago

Looser pays always sounds good in theory and is hell in practice. We have it in Germany (IANAL and there are exceptions and so on) and the result is that companies can do almost anything without getting sued. The risk of paying the whole case is too high for individuals.

mtgx• 14 years ago

I can't imagine Oracle being too bothered by the sum itself, but it must be pretty embarrassing for them to be the aggressors in this case, and ask for billions in the beginning from Google, then to find out that they could only get like $35 million at most, even if they do win, and finally to lose the case, and themselves be the ones paying millions to Google.

Google Files Bill of Costs for Oracle to Pay - $4,030,669

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