Biglaw

Two Big Law Firms Allegedly Involved In Discovery Shenanigans

How'd we get to the motion for sanctions alleging two Biglaw giants hid evidence and suborned perjury?

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Beware the late data dump. It can be tempting after you (or the peons you’ve hired to review the documents) have reviewed documents for weeks or months or years to get complacent with that last, final push. But one semiconductor company is alleging they’ve found the “smoking gun” in just such a manner.

Grail Semiconductor Inc. filed a lawsuit in 2007 against Mitsubishi alleging it stole trade secrets involving a memory chip and violated a nondisclosure agreement. Back in 2001 Grail met with Mitsubishi to discuss investment or development opportunities, but failed to reach a deal. Then, in 2003, Mitsubishi released its own, suspiciously similar chip. Hence the lawsuit. At trial Mitsubishi testified that they never signed an NDA with Grail and didn’t even take detailed notes of the meeting.

Though Grail won at trial, the case was remanded for a retrial on damages. And that is when this hot doc was found — on a dump from the company’s Japanese servers, as it had apparently been deleted from the US servers. The Recorder has the deets:

A recent document dump provided by Mitsubishi’s Japanese arm revealed an email sent the day after the meeting [between Grail and Mitsubishi], which Grail’s counsel hadn’t received during the first trial’s discovery period. The email, on which [Mitsubishi employee] Hirayama was copied, acknowledged there was an NDA in effect, described the meeting in detail and called Grail’s memory chip design “amazing” and “too good to be true,” according to the motion for sanctions.

Grail’s lawyers claim the email was deleted by Mitsubishi Electric & Electronics USA, the defendant in the case, but kept by the company’s Japanese arm.

So basically the opposite of the testimony at trial.

Dum dum dum.

…And that’s how we get to the motion for sanctions, filed by Grail’s attorneys alleging that two Biglaw giants, Squire Patton and Sidley Austin (Squire Patton was the trial counsel and Sidley entered a later appearance), hid evidence and suborned perjury.

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“At a minimum,” Grail’s legal team wrote, “such conduct should result in the severest of sanctions because it impacts the integrity of the judicial process itself.”

It just goes to show you, that even though doc review is considered the very bottom of the litigation totem pole it can still have a big impact.

Squire Patton and Sidley Accused of Misconduct in Trade Secrets Case [The Recorder]

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