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The latest from the "lawyer-eat-lawyer" dept. from Medium.com:
Law Students Fend Off a Patent Troll.
Free legal support drastically changes a patent troll's calculus. They win by offering to settle cases for less than the cost of the legal defense. It's much cheaper for defendants to pay a troll $50,000 to settle a lawsuit than to pay lawyers $200,000 to win it. However, when a law school clinic is involved, the cost of legal defense drops to zero, and defendants have no incentive to pay trolls anything at all. With a free legal and a winning defense, who wouldn't fight all the way to trial? [...] Running a patent litigation defense clinic is not easy, but its possible, and its a worthwhile project. Patent trolls hurt innovation, and law students can help stop them.
This is a pleasant idea — the law students get practical experience; and the Patent troll gets to deal with a free defense against the claim. A real win for everyone.
Has anyone else seen a local law school pick up these kind of cases?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nollij on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:00PM
The risk is that you are dealing with students. Students will make mistakes. Even if the claims are weak, they can still prevail because of amateur representation.
There is a reason that passing the bar is a firm requirement, unless you are representing yourself.
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Thursday August 14 2014, @01:25PM
And you may see a change in the representatives in the middle of the process as the students graduate.
Still - if enough of these students see this side of the battle they may be less likely to take work on the other.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 14 2014, @03:26PM
At my clinic, just like at a real firm, supervisors still have to sign off on everything the students do. It just takes way less time to do that then to draw it up yourself. Students are also required to give help in the future if it is needed, even if not in the clinic. Students also tend to take better notes because they know they might leave or get busy.
The real benefit is dealing with voluminous discovery; students come out of the woodwork to help with that because they know that the only reason in many cases is just to drive up the cost of litigation. Best example is a case I helped with where we got over a million pages of mandatory discovery that arrived in boxes and a discovery request that took 10 students almost two weeks to assemble (which we did rather than challenge it because we knew that is what they wanted). Well, we sent an equally monstrous mandatory and discovery request. They challenged it for being excessive and as proof offered their estimated bill, which was almost $100,000. The judge denied the request because our request was smaller and more specific than theirs, plus he probably knew what they were doing.
An interesting benefit is that our state allows fee shifting. Normally you only get the actual amount charged, but in our state charity and pro bono work fees can be shifted at whatever market value the court thinks is fair. The case above paid almost the entire clinic's budget for three years.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday August 14 2014, @10:39PM
Nice! Kudos!
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday August 15 2014, @03:23AM
The students are supervised by someone who is in good standing with the bar who signs off on everything.