Lawyers Versus Lawyers: We Need a Spy Versus Spy Cartoon Now
June 5, 2025
Just the dinobaby operating without Copilot or its ilk.
Rupert Murdoch, a media tycoon with some alleged telephone intercept activity, owns a number of “real” news outfits. One of these published “What Is Big Tech Trying to Hide? Amazon, Apple, Google Are All Being Accused of Abusing Legal Privilege in Battles to Strip Away Their Power.” As a dinobaby in rural Kentucky, I have absolutely no idea if the information in the write up is spot on, close enough for horseshoes, or dead solid slam dunk in the information game.
What’s interesting is that the US legal system is getting quite a bit of coverage. Recently a judge in a fly over state found herself in handcuffs. Grousing about biased and unfair judges pops up in social media posts. One of my contacts in Manhattan told me that some judges have been receiving communications implying kinetic action.
Yep, lawyers.
Now the story about US big technology companies using the US legal system in a way that directly benefits these firms reveals “news” that I found mildly amusing. In rural Kentucky, when one gets in trouble or receives a call from law enforcement about a wayward sibling, the first action is to call one of the outstanding legal professionals who advertise in direct mail blasts on the six pm news and put memorable telephone numbers on the sides of the mostly empty bus vehicles that slowly prowl the pot-holed streets.
The purpose of the legal system is to get paid to represent the client. The client pays money or here in rural Kentucky a working pinball machine was accepted as payment by my former, deceased, and dearly beloved attorney. You get the idea: Pay money, get professional services. The understanding in my dealings with legal professionals is that the lawyers listen to their paying customers, discuss options among themselves or here in rural Kentucky with a horse in their barn, and formulate arguments to present their clients’ sides of cases or matters.
Obviously a person with money wants attorneys who [a] want compensation, [b] want to allow the client to prevail in a legal dust up, and [c] push back but come to accept their clients’ positions.
So now the Wall Street Journal reveals that the US legal system works in a transparent, predictable, and straightforward way.
My view of the legal problems the US technology firms face is that these innovative firms rode the wave their products and services created among millions of people. As a person who has been involved in successful start ups, I know how the surprise, thrill, and opportunities become the drivers of business decisions. Most of the high technology start ups fail. The survivors believe their intelligence, decision making, and charisma made success happen. That’s a cultural characteristic of what I call the Sillycon Valley way. (I know about this first hand because I lived in Berkeley and experienced the carnival ride of a technological winner.)
Without exposure to how technologies like “online” work, it was and to some extent still difficult to comprehend the potential impacts of the shift from media anchored in non digital ecosystems to the there is not there there hot house of a successful technology. Therefore, neither the “users” of the technology recognized the impact of consumerizing the most successful technologies nor the regulators could understand what was changing on a daily and sometimes hourly cadence. Even those involved at a fast-growing high technology company had no idea that the fizz of winning would override ethical and moral considerations.
Therefore:
- Not really news
- Standard operating procedure for big technology trials since the MSFT anti-trust matter
- The US ethical fabric plus the invincibility and super hero mindsets maps the future of legal dust ups in my opinion.
Net net: Sigh. William James’s quantum energy is definitely not buzzing.
Stephen E Arnold, June 5, 2025
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