A court in California is considering sanctions against Samsung Electronics and its lawyers in view of concerns that the external counsel may have shared confidential information from Apple with Samsung, according to a court document.
“Having finally crawled out from under the boxes, it appears to the undersigned that if anything was breached, it was this court’s protective order, and that sanctions against Samsung and its attorneys are warranted,” noted U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division, in a ruling Friday.
The judge went through boxes of Samsung’s documents to get to the bottom of allegations of the suspected breach of confidential information, including information on Apple’s patent licensing agreements with Nokia, Ericsson, Sharp and Philips, which were marked for viewing by the attorneys alone.
Apple provided the information to Samsung’s law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan during the discovery phase of a lawsuit in California in which Apple was awarded damages of US$1.05 billion against Samsung. Judge Lucy Koh vacated $450 million in damages, and ordered a retrial to recalculate damages which comes up Tuesday.
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