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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> And how many other big-firm lawyers are entwined with "start-ups" that are actually holding companies, created to attack the very corporations they are supposed to be defending?

Considering you can't even by stock at a large firm without clearing it, I'm going to guess: almost nobody.

There is no way mlb knew about the nature of this business. Firms survive on reputation. Nobody hires a firm with a bad reputation for keeping client confidences. Why would the other partners risk their income so this guy's wife could make a buck? It makes no sense, especially considering how much money there is in representing apple as a repeat customer.

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I have to agree.

Most of this story is the typical "try to conflict out any law firm that opposes you by any means necessary" that large companies practice.

The only interesting twist is that they may have a valid point for once :)

> There is no way mlb knew about the nature of this business.

I'm not so sure. I can think of several not so implausible scenarios, most of them involving some combination of the following:

1) The parent firm has a silent stake in the troll firm

2) John McAleese truly believed and somehow convinced his partners that he/they wouldn't be implicated in this

3) John McAleese had some sort of leverage over the firm

It might not make sense to any of us, but despite that, John McAleese appears to have been employed there as recently as last week, despite his wife operating a company that has openly been trolling around its touchscreen patent for years.

It might make sense to them if they thought Apple wouldn't be able to connect the dots or hold them responsible, and/or they had some sort of incentive that outweighed what they perceived to be the potential fallout. I doubt we'll ever learn for sure what the true story was.

"despite his wife operating a company that has openly been trolling around its touchscreen patent for years."

I'm not sure why this is relevant. It's not like they are Apple's corporate counsel. It seems very odd to expect a law firm to keep track of what it's partners' wives are doing.

Particularly since it turns out to be very easy to hide ownership/etc of this kind of thing, in a way that the law firm would never have discovered it.

Actually, when entities regulate their employees' trades in public and non-public equities, they typically also require pre-clearance for an member of one's household. At least that was the case for me. As a client paying sometimes in excess of $1,000 per hour, I think one has a right to expect this also.

FWIW: It wasn't the case for me, even in situations where my trades were regulated :)

The law firm was aware of that, it's mentioned in the article.

Citation needed. As mentioned a few times, the article makes a bare assertion that he told the law firm, and it's not clear if this is what one of the people said, the author's personal view, or what.

"One thing that is clear: some at Morgan Lewis knew what McAleese was doing. He told the firm's then-general counsel that the company he invested in was going to sue Apple, and he sent a follow-up note after the lawsuit was filed."

Since it mentions people in specific positions at Morgan Lewis and a particular follow-up note, I assume it's the part of proceedings.

Would it make sense for Arthur Andersen to help Enron cook the books and when it inevitably exploded go down with it? Probably not, yet it still happened.

Arthur Andersen is a very salient example. It went from $10 billion/year in revenues to nothing overnight because of the damage to the brand (who wanted the Arthur Andersen name on their public financial statements after Enron?)

Yet, their implosion was the result of a conviction for obstruction of justice that was overturned by the Supreme Court: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen_LLP_v._United_S... ("In the court's view, the instructions allowed the jury to convict Andersen without proving that the firm knew it had broken the law or that there had been a link to any official proceeding that prohibited the destruction of documents."). See also the relevant e-mail used for convicting the company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Temple ("The Supreme Court's unanimous reversal of the conviction reinforces the opinion that the jury should not have inferred any liability on Arthur Andersen based solely upon the October 16 memo.")

In reality, it's unlikely that Arthur Andersen (as an entity) knew or directed any destruction of documents. What happened was that the lead partner on the Enron account (a high up guy within the company) did so, without the knowledge or approval of the company's management (as a general rule, professional services firms have very diffuse power structures with important partners having almost complete autonomy). Andersen definitely helped Enron cook the books, but it was the partner on the Enron account, and those under his employment, that engaged in the wrongdoing. That definitely helped his bottom line, but at the expense of creating a risk that ultimately brought the entire firm down.

He notified the lead counsel at his employer before and after suing Apple. So the question is, why did he still work there until recently?

The article does not say this. It says "He had told Morgan Lewis' general counsel at the time about the lawsuit"

It doesn't cite a source. The rest around it is in quotes, so it's not clear if this is the article author's interpretation of what John McAleese's said, or the article author's personal view. If it's the former, you have to be very very careful, because they are all lawyers.

The literal wording is "He had told Morgan Lewis' general counsel at the time about the lawsuit". It does not say "He had told Morgan Lewis' general counsel at the time of his involvement in the lawsuit".

He could have emailed the general counsel saying "Hey, it looks like apple got sued again. I bet we'll make some money from them on this!"

etc

It doesn't say what he told them. There is, by itself, nothing unethical about a lawyer's wife suing a company who is a client of the lawyer's firm in a different practice area, as long as appropriate measures are taken to maintain client confidences. It's not 1870 and husbands and wives aren't considered the same person anymore.

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