Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4344 mails)

[James Knott <james.knott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thursday 04 August 2005 3:46 pm, James Knott wrote:
>>My question is what happens, should the lawyers find out that the client
>>has lied?  That there really is no case?  Somehow, I don't get the
>>impression that David Boies would proceed with a case he knows to be
>>fraudulent.
> There are 2 issues here:
> 1. There is no real case, his clients misled him, but there is no fraud. 
> Here, I think the attorney would be upset, but may carry the case forward, 
> or he may withdraw. 
> 
> 2. The client has provided fraudulent data to the attorney and to the court. 
> In this case, the attorney probably should withdraw from the case, but that 
> might be difficult because of some attorney-client privileges.  However, 
> the attorney is an officer of the court, and can get in quite a bit of 
> trouble if he presents knowingly fraudulent data to the court. 

Given that despite being told by both their senior software engineer and
an outside consultant, that there was no infringment, that SCO threatend
 companies with lawsuits, if they didn't licence Linux, I'd say they're
getting close to fraud.  There is also something called "tortious
interference", where someone tries to use the courts, to unjustly attack
a competitor, which may also apply here.