Almost three years ago, we wrote about the tension between a lawyer’s defense of his own professional conduct and his duties of loyalty and confidentiality to his client. The issue was presented in Qualcomm Inc. v. Broadcom Corp., a California patent infringement case involving cell phone technology.
During trial, the court learned that Qualcomm and its counsel did not produce more than 200,000 pages of relevant electronic documents. As a result, Qualcomm was ordered to pay Broadcom’s hefty legal fees ($8.5 million), and the district court judge referred the matter to a magistrate for consideration of further sanctions. The magistrate found that Qualcomm intentionally withheld thousands of documents that had been requested during discovery and that certain of the withheld documents directly contradicted one of Qualcomm’s key arguments. In addition, the magistrate sanctioned Qualcomm’s attorneys based upon the premise that they failed to conduct a reasonable inquiry into the adequacy of Qualcomm’s document production.
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