Lawyers of the Day: An Embarrassment of Riches
Or a richness of embarrassment. Today we're going to name not one, but seven Lawyers of the Day.
Our first Lawyer of the Day is Mark Mersel (formerly of Morrison & Foerster, now at Bryan Cave). In case you missed the shout-out in Morning Docket, here's a bit more, from the WSJ Law Blog:
It's a litigator's worst dream -- costing your client serious money by missing a filing deadline.That nightmare was a reality for MoFo, which appears to have cost its client Toshiba America $1 million when it was one-minute late -- 1 minute! -- in filing a motion for attorneys fees.
For the exciting details -- which involve a courier zooming through traffic on a motorcycle, and an unfortunately timed train -- read the full post.
The other six Lawyers of the Day are no strangers to these pages. Let's call them the Qualcomm Six. From the Recorder:
Six attorneys in the Qualcomm Inc. discovery fiasco were sanctioned Monday for "monumental" discovery violations and referred to the State Bar of California for possible discipline.
Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder attorneys James Batchelder, Adam Bier, Kevin Leung, Christian Mammen and Lee Patch, and Heller Ehrman's Stanley Young were sanctioned and harshly criticized by U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Major in a 42-page order. The ruling follows a patent infringement trial Qualcomm had brought against Broadcom Corp.
The attorneys "assisted Qualcomm in committing this incredible discovery violation by intentionally hiding or recklessly ignoring relevant documents, ignoring or rejecting numerous warning signs that Qualcomm's document search was inadequate, and blindly accepting Qualcomm's unsupported assurances that its document search was adequate," Major wrote.
Document production sucks -- or, to put it more nicely, it's a thankless task. It's time-intensive, mind-numbingly boring, and a general pain in the a**. If you do it right, you're just doing your job; but if you screw it up, consider yourself screwed. Monumentally.
Six Lawyers in Qualcomm Case Sanctioned for 'Monumental' Discovery Violations [The Recorder via Law.com]
Judge rebukes Qualcomm, its attorneys [San Diego Union-Tribune via Blogonaut]
A Litigator's Nightmare: Late Filing Costs Client $1 Million [WSJ Law Blog]
(0) Comments
Boring.
this is incredible, piss-poor lawyering. You would never see this at a top firm. Get what you pay for!
11:18 -- if you're gonna unload some snark, at least make it funny.
Because we all know what happens with doc review at "top firms."
11:26: Doc review at "top firms" gets outsourced to crap firms (MOFO, etc).
The 'important' language from the Order: "...[O]ne or more of the retained lawyers chose not to look in the correct locations for the correct documents, to accept the unsubstantiated assurances of an important client that its search was sufficient, to ignore the warning signs that the document search and production were inadequate, not to press Qualcomm employees for the truth,...". Spot-on, Magistrate. When attorneys cannot press an important client, but must for client-relations reasons simply accept assurances...they're screwed.
The mofo thing is very misleading. The WSJ has done some really piss poor reporting here. Nothing says it was filed one minute late - instead it says it was filed after the court had closed. Also the fee award motion was denied on multiple grounds - not just tardiness, but also failure to support the fee.
Very alarmist reporting that misrepresents what actually happened.
Sucks for the new associate who probably had no idea what he was doing.
this is incredible, piss-poor lawyering. You would never see this at a top firm. Get what you pay for!
Scheduling to meet a deadline in lawyering now? Youre a tool- this error has nothing to do with lawyering- the non-lawyering aspect of noting a deadline was the cause- that is not lawyering-
Wow... full cut & paste--two posts in a row, Lat!--from the WSJ Legal Blog. How about some fresh content?
At least we got to go to the WSJ Law Blog and read all the dumbsh*t posts saying "What is MoFo?" and "Isn't it so funny people call it MoFo?"
Must be nice to be a 1L.
I'm not at all surprised that DCMB ended up in such a discovery debacle. Their discovery management for several recent major litigations was weak to very week. The trial attorneys are killers in the courtroom, but the preparation before trial is a logistical nightmare. Horrible communication all around.
I almost accepted offers from Heller and Mofo - glad I didn't !!!