SCO's legal expenses
Message ID: 79613
Posted By: thaddeusbeier
Posted On: 2004-01-12 11:52:00
Subject: SCO's Legal Expenses
Recs: 2
If you read the information that SCO has been putting out in it's various reports to the SEC, you will see that the 'retainer fund' that Boies&Co. required has been replenished a couple of times. This implies that their legal expenses for calendar year 2003 were on the order of $3 million.
Think about it, for a minute, and project into the future. What did Boies do for his $3 million? There was really precious little product for that money. SCO's filings were pitiful and short, and they have really not begun to get into discovery. No litigation has happened yet. There have been only a very few court hearings, and the biggest one of those was run by Darl's brother. Yet, they managed to spend $3 million.
If this charade of a trial continues, imagine what the costs will be? For this to go to trial, you would have to believe that there would be depositions going on all day, every day, for the next year -- perhaps multiple depositions going on simultaneously. SCO will have to produce tens of thousands of pages of discovery material, each of which will have to be vetted by their lawyers. SCO's lawyers will have to analyze probably millions of pages of IBM's discovery material -- and I somehow don't think that IBM is going to make it particularly easy to interpret it.
There will surely be hundreds of motions presented by both sides, over the scope of discovery and the admissibility of evidience. There will be appeals of many of these motions to the appeals court.
There will be very expensive expert testimony to procure -- and IBM's laywers will surely depose these experts and to a length and depth that will leave them quivering pools of jelly.
Then there is litigation. The actual trial will probably go on for months, months of the full expense of all of Boies' lawyers and assistants.
So, basically, you can see that SCO's legal costs so far are not even the tip of the iceberg. There will likely be $50M in legal costs before it's over.
thad
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Posted By: thaddeusbeier
Posted On: 2004-01-12 11:52:00
Subject: SCO's Legal Expenses
Recs: 2
If you read the information that SCO has been putting out in it's various reports to the SEC, you will see that the 'retainer fund' that Boies&Co. required has been replenished a couple of times. This implies that their legal expenses for calendar year 2003 were on the order of $3 million.
Think about it, for a minute, and project into the future. What did Boies do for his $3 million? There was really precious little product for that money. SCO's filings were pitiful and short, and they have really not begun to get into discovery. No litigation has happened yet. There have been only a very few court hearings, and the biggest one of those was run by Darl's brother. Yet, they managed to spend $3 million.
If this charade of a trial continues, imagine what the costs will be? For this to go to trial, you would have to believe that there would be depositions going on all day, every day, for the next year -- perhaps multiple depositions going on simultaneously. SCO will have to produce tens of thousands of pages of discovery material, each of which will have to be vetted by their lawyers. SCO's lawyers will have to analyze probably millions of pages of IBM's discovery material -- and I somehow don't think that IBM is going to make it particularly easy to interpret it.
There will surely be hundreds of motions presented by both sides, over the scope of discovery and the admissibility of evidience. There will be appeals of many of these motions to the appeals court.
There will be very expensive expert testimony to procure -- and IBM's laywers will surely depose these experts and to a length and depth that will leave them quivering pools of jelly.
Then there is litigation. The actual trial will probably go on for months, months of the full expense of all of Boies' lawyers and assistants.
So, basically, you can see that SCO's legal costs so far are not even the tip of the iceberg. There will likely be $50M in legal costs before it's over.
thad
------------------------------------------------------------
The text of this Yahoo Message Board post has been licensed for
copying and distribution by the Yahoo Message Board user
"thaddeusbeier" under the following license:
License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike v2.0
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