I'm always a bit boggled at why folks think stuff like this is a "win" for lawyers, just because some lawyer makes money. Dealing with these kinds of cases with clients like Apple is like running 2 startups at once. You are working 14+ hour days for a year, dealing with tons of emergencies, researching 100 page briefs as fast as you can, etc.
This is not the win. The real "win" is apple paying you 1k/hr hour to do relatively simple stuff because you won this case. If you lose, well, it's "what have you done for me lately". Hell, if you lose, Apple would probably demand an hourly rate reduction if you want to keep their business.
Look, I would like the judge ordered them to do some custom phone application development instead of citing legal documents. That way, they will need to hire more developers to do that, or allocate some developers from other departments, thus creating more developer jobs. Instead, the lawyers got to fight that battle and get paid for that, thus, they won.
A lawyer's action can benefit or harm himself; it is fairly trivial to determine which in any particular case. However a lawyers actions can also benefit or harm lawyers as a group.
A single lawyer initiating and losing lots of lawsuits is not really going to benefit himself, but he is doing his part to drive demand for lawyers even higher. If lawyers were microbes, we could expect to see this sort of behavior become more prevalent so long as it provided a benefit to lawyers with similar traits greater than the damage done to the individual lawyer.
How is this an example of a "ridiculous court battle?"
We have trade-marks so businesses can build a brand and keep people from free-riding on their good-will. Trademarks are fairly arbitrary and not intrinsically valuable, so the only real consideration at play is that people use different ones, to minimize confusion.
"iFone" and "iPhone" are confusingly similar. Somehow, you have to decide who gets to use the mark in Mexico.
And battling lost battles over and over with 0.1% of a chance to win for years just out of hope that, by same miracle or mistake, they could win the case is ridiculous. I'd rather them spend their money on innovation, but that's just my opinion, and the money they spend on lawyers is just their money :)
"I have my cellular service with ifone" "I love my new iPhone" "ifones service sucks" "The iPhone sucks"
Even in the last two comparisons, conversationally, I don't see anyone being confused. Apples product is large enough it is a household name now. That helps disrupt that confusion. Conversely, were Apples product not well known, this would just go under the radar and no one would be confused either.
I understand legally you must protect you trademark, though in this case I'm seeing it as falling into the clause of "if those marks offer identical or similar offerings".
IANAL but doesn't one being a product and one being a service pretty much nullify the need to protect or defend the trademark on either side? That's how I'm seeing this one.
Now, were Apple to purchase a telco, that would change everything for me, even if they kept their new shiny telcos name as it previously existed.
I did read Apple started a new wireless research division. Perhaps one day we won't all be tethered to mandatory text messaging fees and bandwidth rates that are truly extortion in my opinion.
There is in fact, a large risk of "no payout", or worse, a loss, if apple decides to argue about your billing (which they will). As a firm, you may end up having to pay your associates more than apple pays you, depending on how things go, generating a net loss for the firm. Your associates get paid well (particularly in the IP field), but usually this just about makes up for the large amount of law school debt they have (which can easily be $3000+ a month). Again not that they are poor starving people, but the salary differences you see often are eaten by debt payments and the fact that they work ridiculous hours.
On the direct "payout side", you are right that trademark work is not usually contingency work, but a lot of other work is, in which case the risk is immense. Firms are often fronting many millions of dollars in large cases, and all you have is the hope you will get paid on time. Your recourse if you don't is to sue the client, and then spend even more money, and either settle for 50% to not drag it out (the average time to resolve these cases is 7 years), or hope a judge doesn't think your billing is atrocious.
This risk is certainly less in the corporate world (in my wife's area, family law, individual clients can have something like a 35% non-payment rate, particularly in hard economies), but still there.
Again, i'm not saying lawyers don't make money, and aren't well off in a lot of cases, but to pretend that lawyers are somehow guaranteed "big bucks" in cases like this is just a fantasy. It's a business. Sometimes you do well, sometimes you don't. There are no guarantees, and there is always risk. Given the state of the legal job market and the legal world , if you want to make big bucks, running a law firm and taking cases like this is not the way to do it anymore.
And yes, there are no guarantees and there is always risk, but in this trademark case the amount of risk versus upside is very very favorable to the lawyers involved.
What I don't understand is why "taking cases like this is not the way to do it anymore." I simply don't see why the lawyers aren't almost guaranteed to make good money in this particular case, especially with a deep-pocketed client like Apple involved. I would like to know why though.
Good day.
That the barbarians lost some of their plunder in fires they had needlessly started was probably little comfort to the villagers...
Your point regarding law students having crippling debt is an emotional red herring. Most people here have or have had huge student loans or are otherwise personally taking a large financial gamble for their careers/businesses.
You also mention the difficulties of paying employees when on contract yourself when missing that everyone else is in the same boat too, trying to make payroll in an uncertain world.
And it's amusing that you mention legal difficulties as you're talking about exactly the people who, collectively, cause those difficulties for everyone. If not for the sort of lawyers who needlessly sued iFone, there wouldn't be the sort of lawyers who'd defend a company skipping out on a legal bill like that, and so forth.
There's risk in everything from fry-cook to indie iOS app developer. Not only is it callous of the people who suffer the least from economic downturn (the upper class, most educated) to complain about problems facing everyone, but it's also another attempt to muddy the issue.
The lawyers alone chose to be there and they alone profited. The money iFone wasted defending itself from this attack could have gone to providing services to customers, wages to employees, and profits to investors.
Lawyers (good ones) want to provide value for their clients/employers as much as a (good) developer does.
In corporate legal warfare, such as this, the lawyers are just doing their assigned duties. To win or lose probably doesn't mean a bonus usually.
