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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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I very much doubt that | 219 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
I very much doubt that
Authored by: jbb on Tuesday, December 04 2012 @ 01:26 PM EST
Samsung's question to Apple was brilliant because no matter which way Apple answered Samsung won something. There was no doubt which way Apple was going to answer.

I don't claim the members of Apple's legal team are paragons of moral virtue but I doubt they would have engaged in such chicanery because the risk would have been great and the reward would have been small. It makes even less sense for them to then bring attention this area they would have great desire to keep hush hush. Finally, if Samsung's lawyers had evidence of the chicanery and just sat on it then they would be culpable too.

IMO the lesson from all of this is not Apple's lawyers must have done something evil. The lesson is that when lawyers play word games to twist the truth around to mislead without having to technically lie (like we've seen time and again in SCO v. The World and Oracle v. Google) then people stop believing what all lawyers say and the whole system is headed for collapse. Our legal system is based on trust. Our entire civilization is based on trust. When highly paid, highly respected, highly visible people abuse that trust for short-term, selfish, pecuniary gains then we all lose.

If you want you can blame the judges for not reigning in the lawyers. You can then blame the legislators for endlessly blocking judicial appointments. Then you can blame the people for constantly electing corrupt politicians. The real question is: what can each one of us do as an individual to help restore trust in our society?

---
Our job is to remind ourselves that there are more contexts
than the one we’re in now — the one that we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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