Why it pays to spread the litigation risk
01 June 2008
Litigating to protect your IP rights can be a multi-million dollar exercise. Emma Barraclough outlines some funding options to ease the financial pain
In the middle of April, lawyers at London-headquartered corporate law firm Allen & Overy found themselves in a position that few of their peers would envy – caught in the media spotlight over the size of the bill they presented to a client. The firm had charged BlackBerry device maker Research in Motion £5.18 million ($10.3 million) for advice in a patent dispute with Visto in which RIM was ultimately victorious. But less than two months after Mr Justice Floyd revoked Visto's '905 patent on the grounds of obviousness, the case hit the headlines when the judge issued a critical costs order in which he said that a breakdown of Allen & Overy's bill revealed some "shocking statistics". Among these, he pointed to two associates at the firm who had spent a total of 4,543 hours on the case in the course of 15 months, racking up a bill...
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