Intel and AMD agreed to bury the hatchet this week, with a surprise settlement pursuant to which Intel will pay AMD $1.25 billion and AMD will drop the various antitrust and infringement claims it has filed around the world.
AMD had accused Intel of a host of anticompetitive practices in their fight for share of the PC CPU market (Intel has around 70%, AMD the balance – there’s no real third option). The US suit was scheduled to go to trial in Delaware next spring. That case had already produced 25 million pages of filings and more than 300 depositions, so you know there’s plenty of legal work to go around.
The firms (eight and counting), the lawyers (at least thirty), and an obsessive analysis of a press release after the jump.
O’Melveny & Myers represents AMD, and announced the lawyers involved rather strangely (what can we say, we’re suckers for reading into the order in which names appear):
Chuck Diamond, Linda Smith, Mark Samuels, Henry Thumann, David Herron, James Pearl, Michael Maddigan, Mike McGuinness, Ryan Yagura, and Darin Snyder led the O’Melveny team, which also included partner David Beddow and Brussels partners Riccardo Celli and Christian Riis-Madsen.
We quoted it so you can parse the awkward structuring of the announcement. You know something is awry when the partners aren’t listed alphabetically, which is what a normal release would look like if everyone really was equal.
Diamond (who is the lawyer you’d pick if you really had to pick one leader of this crew), Smith, and Pearl are business litigators. Samuels is an IP litigator, but he’s a member of the Executive Committee, so he gets close to top billing – note how much farther down the list come the other two IP litigators: Yagura (who worked at Intel as an engineer in an earlier life) and Snyder. Thumann, who will be celebrating 50 years of practice next year, is probably one of those elder statesmen of the firm that they like to trot out and bask in his reflected glory. Herron and McGuinness are employment lawyers, but there were no significant employment claims as far as we know, so why would they be “leading” the team? Same could be asked of Maddigan, who is basically a healthcare class-action defense lawyer.
And what about those danglers at the end? Beddow is a transactional antitrust lawyer in DC, so why not include him on the list of leaders? Giving EU partners second-class treatment is only slightly less odd, but they obviously did lead the European component, which was huge (and led to a $1.45 billion fine against Intel by the European regulators).
Basically, we think it’s disingenuous to list 10 lawyers as “leading” a team; then playing games with the order in which they’re listed is just adding silly on top.
Intel cast a wider net for counsel. Here are the lawyers we know have been involved:
- Robert Cooper was going to be lead trial counsel in the Delaware case, along with his Gibson Dunn partners Michael Denger, Joseph Kattan, Daniel Floyd, Mark Weber, Rod Stone, Kay Kochenderfer, Samuel Liversidge, and John Wood;
- James Venit, an antitrust partner in Skadden’s Brussels office led the EU defense;
- Lester Brown of Howrey represented Intel in seeking coverage of Gibson Dunn’s bills for the defense, and the firm supposedly had other work on the actual underlying case as well;
- Bingham McCutchen reports that it has been lead counsel for Intel on more than 70 pending consolidated class actions and other related state-court suits, and co-counsel in the Delaware AMD action (we’ve identified David Balabanian, James Hunt, Christopher Hockett, and Richard Ripley as lawyers involved from some filings);
- Potter, Anderson & Corroon was Delaware counsel; and
- Duane Morris and Perkins Coie also have been involved.
Who else did we miss?
And what happens when a plum assignment like this disappears in the blink of an eye? O’Melveny is guardedly optimistic, according to AmLaw Litigation Daily:
Over the last year, AMD has been one of O’Melveny’s top five clients in terms of billings, in large part because of this litigation. Bradley Butwin, cochair of the firm’s litigation department, insists that the abrupt cessation of this massive matter won’t materially impact O’Melveny’s revenue. He notes that the firm gets a half-billion dollars from litigation matters overall, so no one case will affect the bottom line too much. The firm throughout its history has redeployed resources from one case to another, he notes, and this settlement will give O’Melveny a chance to move lawyers to other cases.
Yes, I’m sure they’re thrilled about this wonderful opportunity to move lawyers to other cases… never mind the millions of dollars a month in billings (although a success fee likely isn’t out of the question, either). As we reported back in February, Intel sued its insurers to cover more of Gibson Dunn’s bills (as mentioned above), at the time asking for $50 million on top of $66 million that had already been paid in defense costs. We’re guessing the burn rate was pushing $4 million/mo all in as the trial approached. What do you think?
Actually, things are slightly better for Skadden and Gibson Dunn. Even though AMD dropped its suits, a number of regulators had already begun sniffing around, and those investigations and potential subsequent prosecutions aren’t affected at all.
Related posts:
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.