A&O faces costs post-mortem after BlackBerry judgment
BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion is set to scrutinise the details of the £5m-plus bill that Allen & Overy presented it with following a patent battle with wireless technology company Visto.
BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) is set to scrutinise the details of the £5m-plus bill that Allen & Overy (A&O) presented it with following a patent battle with wireless technology company Visto.
Mr Justice Floyd handed down a critical judgment in the High Court last week (17 April) that slammed the magic circle firm for billing almost £5.2m and the equivalent of nine man-years in costs for a five-day trial.
RIM licensing chief Tom Sanchez told The Lawyer he was pleased with A&O’s work, which resulted in the correct result from his point of view - getting a Visto patent invalidated. However, he added that he would take Floyd J’s criticisms “under advisement”.
“We’ll do a post-mortem. It would be foolish not to see what could be done better,” said Sanchez.
Sanchez said A&O had won the instruction on the back of a beauty parade that saw longstanding advisers A&O and Lovells emerge as the most attractive candidates. But Lovells was precluded from gaining the instruction as it had already been instructed on Qualcomm v Nokia (2008), which ran almost concurrently with RIM v Visto (2008).
“If you have the same set of lawyers conducting two major cases back to back, that’s a bit of an issue,” Sanchez told The Lawyer.
The cost ruling in Qualcomm, which was also in front of Floyd J, was announced four days before RIM. Qualcomm, which involved two patents and which took place over three weeks, saw Bird & Bird and Lovells bill around £6m each.
The RIM case involved one patent and lasted five days, with Visto’s law firm Taylor Wessing billing its client £1m - a fifth of the costs accumulated by A&O.
Gary Moss, who led the Taylor Wessing team, said: “I don’t see how they could have racked up all those hours. Every time we were in court they seemed to outnumber us two to one at least.”
Nicola Dagg, who led the A&O team for RIM, said the final costs also reflected a battle over two other patents, which was resolved before the trial took place.
“The reason the RIM-Visto trial was a little shorter was that two of the patents had gone out of the action before the trial, but all of the work was done through the 15 months before the litigation for those other patents,” said Dagg.
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Readers' comments (31)
Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:03 am
Costs
The 5-day trial length makes it quite clear that there were not terribly many issues in dispute in the proceedings. In that case, Allen & Overy's costs are so disproportionate to the issues being litigated that those involved should be ashamed of their management of the matter.
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:03 am
Costs
A&O's use of the term "tiny fraction" in its spokesman's response, merely underlines the firm's inability to grasp the concept of proportionality.
A&O should have spent some of the immense man hours it clocked-up considering their client's business rather than its own. I personally can't imagine any legal issue requiring that amount of research, the average adult could comprehend (from a cold start) the time-space continuum in far far less time.
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:04 am
Costs
Maybe Taylor Wessings' client had no confidence in the case? That could explain the 5 to 1 difference!
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:05 am
Mr Justice Floyd
Those are some fairly strong expressions by Mr Justice Floyd. Christopher Floyd is not someone who is given to extreme statements, he is normally quite conservative and not strongly extrovert in the way he expresses himself.
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:05 am
costs
Trainees and paralegals do what they're told. Like the sorcerer's apprentice, they'll carry on doing it until they're told to stop. If the hours are high it's because of the lack of management.
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:05 am
"Big Company in Big Cases Cost Big Money Shocker"
Does anyone sense that the Anonymous posters might be from rival law firms? They purport to know a lot about this case considering that they weren't involved. Given that RIM won the case, one can only assume that they were very happy with the efforts of A&O's poor, overworked associates (one's heart bleeds). RIM can hardly have failed to notice that they were paying a goodly amount for A&O's services, but then they are a big company and presumably wanted to win. So where exactly is the news?
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:06 am
Aren't we all missing the point a bit?
If we're going to re-write the headline, surely those downtrodden associates at A&O should be hailed as heroes for saving the legal profession's favourite business efficiency tool?! Or have the ex-lawyers at the Lawyer been released from their email shackles? ...Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld...
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:06 am
Big money, big case
Well, it's pretty obvious the judge wasn't too impressed with A&O, whatever RIM might think...
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:07 am
A&O COSTS
Interestingly, if one takes the two associates referred to - their hours total around 4500, which equates to £444.44/hour as the associate rate. If one assumes that say 1500 hours p.a. were recorded this implies a billing total for each associate of £666,666 . OK so I only got this by rounding the hours down to 4500.......Is there a dark force at play here, or maybe this is where the 66% figure came from?
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Anonymous | 21-Apr-2008 11:07 am
Costs
Entertaining reading, for sure, but you can't ignore the fact that, though Taylor Wessing racked up a fifth of A&O's costs, they lost the case. You don't win major commercial litigation by counting the pennies.
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