Litigious bastards – my contribution to the campaign against Jones Day v. BlockShopper
February 21, 2009
As per Slashdot Article about a law firm unhappy about links to them out of control. So, say hello to Streisand effect 
Litigious bastards evil law firm full of idiots
I couldn’t care less about them…
Exterminate!
Don’t you mean you *could* (and would like to) care less about them?
Saying that Jones-Day are litigious bastards is a bit unfair. Jones-Day are stupid bastards would be closer to accurate. Even that might be overstating the case.
They may not be so much stupid as totally self-centered, narrow-minded, etc. It’s quite possible that in some narrow area they are quite adequate. Think of them as a legal expert-system. Within a narrow domain they produce the correct answers, but it’s a brittle expertise, and beyond that narrow expertise they produce stunningly irrelevant and incorrect answers.
It’s the judge in this case that should really be the target of opprobrium. He may not be crooked. He may only be incompetent. But he should have thrown the case out of court when requested rather than respond by bullying the less affluent party. It’s quite possible that a case of malfeasance, or at least misfeasance, could be made against him. I suspect that he’s being mildly corrupt…but if you are the defendant his “mild corruption” doesn’t appear all that mild. OTOH, I don’t have any real evidence. Only the public record.
All that I really know is that he took a case where the defendant appears totally in the right and threatened them with excessive expenses to cause them to drop their defense. This in response to the defense requesting him to drop the case because it was groundless. He didn’t identify any grounds, or if he did I haven’t heard about it. He just told them that if they pushed forwards they would incur very large expenses. It would be unfair on that basis to conclude that he was corrupt in any particular manner. I may suspect that he was playing politics, and that Jones-Day is strongly politically connected. I don’t know that to be the case. To me it appears evident that the just response would have been to drop the case. He didn’t want to. The reasons why he didn’t want to may only be speculated upon, but I haven’t been able to come up with any savory ones.
OTOH, all of my information is based off of secondary or tertiary sources. So I could be misunderstanding what’s going on. Possibly.