"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.