A Patent Lie Read Online Free Page A
the office to get ready for court and to find out from Rudy what the spread was for the Bills game on Sunday.
TWO
----
Heilbrun, Hardy occupied five floors of an office tower on Battery Street, off the Embarcadero at the edge of the city's financial district. In the conference room adjoining the office that before his death had belonged to Robert Pearsall, Michael Seeley shifted comfortably in a leather-cushioned chair. Thirty-eight stories down, sailboats scudded across the sun-speckled bay and the Golden Gate Bridge was a cupid's bow across the water. To Seeley, the scene was as flat and trite as a picture-postcard.
Fat loose-leaf binders labeled
Vaxtek, Inc. v. Laboratories St. Gall, S. A.
filled the conference room's wall-to-wall shelves. The black binders held the deposition transcripts of witnesses who would be testifying at the trial; the red binders collected patents and scientific papers related to the development and efficacy of Vaxtek's discovery, AV/AS; and the blue binders contained legal research memos. The black and red binders outnumbered the blue binders fifty to one, confirming the trial lawyer's truth that in litigation facts count more than law.
The footwork for a case this size entails months of depositions, reviewing mountains of interrogatories, camping out in chilly warehouses to examine documents, researching the applicable law, and arguing motions in court. St. Gall had overstaffed the case the way giant companies usually do, with lawyers drawn from firms in Zurich, New York, and Chicago, as well as San Francisco. Pearsall, by contrast, had staffed the case leanly, with no more than two dozen lawyers, paralegals, document clerks, and typists. Although Seeley and Chris Palmieri, Pearsall's second chair, would be Vaxtek's only trial lawyers in the courtroom, the team from the office would feed them facts, research, and law as needed.
Running big cases had not been part of Seeley's dream when he set out for law school, but, like the conference room in the sky, responsibility for a case like this offered a reassuring familiarity. He was still uncertain about his motive for coming to San Francisco. It could have been to prove that Leonard, and Seeley's own deepest fears, were wrong, that his professional edge was as sharp as ever. Or perhaps it was no more complicated than escaping the onset of another gray Buffalo winter which, if it was like the last one, would hold a perfect mirror to his soul. In either case, coming to San Francisco was the only way he was going to find out.
Before leaving Buffalo, Seeley spent a week of eighteen-hour days working through the binders that Palmieri express-shipped to him, all the while arranging continuances for his cases in the state and county courts. By the end of the week, as he began to connect the jigsaw pieces of Vaxtek's case, Seeley had a good measure of Pearsall's qualities as a lawyer. He would not have assembled the case the same way, but neither could he find anything to fault in the shrewd care with which Pearsall had gathered his facts and witnesses.
Pearsall's secretary, assigned to Seeley for the duration of the trial, came into the conference room while he was rechecking the witness list to locate a misplaced deposition binder. Christina Hoff couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, young to have worked for a partner as senior as Pearsall, and in her neat skirt and oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was mostly elbows and knees. She had shown him around the firm's five floors of offices when he arrived earlier in the morning, and although she had touched up her makeup, it still failed to mask the bleariness in her eyes, from fatigue, Seeley thought, or grief.
“I just wanted to see if you needed anything.” She had a nice voice.
“Should I call you Christina or Tina?”
“Tina. How'd you know?”
She was almost six feet tall, just an inch or two shorter than Seeley, and he guessed that, as a gawky adolescent, the
TWO
----
Heilbrun, Hardy occupied five floors of an office tower on Battery Street, off the Embarcadero at the edge of the city's financial district. In the conference room adjoining the office that before his death had belonged to Robert Pearsall, Michael Seeley shifted comfortably in a leather-cushioned chair. Thirty-eight stories down, sailboats scudded across the sun-speckled bay and the Golden Gate Bridge was a cupid's bow across the water. To Seeley, the scene was as flat and trite as a picture-postcard.
Fat loose-leaf binders labeled
Vaxtek, Inc. v. Laboratories St. Gall, S. A.
filled the conference room's wall-to-wall shelves. The black binders held the deposition transcripts of witnesses who would be testifying at the trial; the red binders collected patents and scientific papers related to the development and efficacy of Vaxtek's discovery, AV/AS; and the blue binders contained legal research memos. The black and red binders outnumbered the blue binders fifty to one, confirming the trial lawyer's truth that in litigation facts count more than law.
The footwork for a case this size entails months of depositions, reviewing mountains of interrogatories, camping out in chilly warehouses to examine documents, researching the applicable law, and arguing motions in court. St. Gall had overstaffed the case the way giant companies usually do, with lawyers drawn from firms in Zurich, New York, and Chicago, as well as San Francisco. Pearsall, by contrast, had staffed the case leanly, with no more than two dozen lawyers, paralegals, document clerks, and typists. Although Seeley and Chris Palmieri, Pearsall's second chair, would be Vaxtek's only trial lawyers in the courtroom, the team from the office would feed them facts, research, and law as needed.
Running big cases had not been part of Seeley's dream when he set out for law school, but, like the conference room in the sky, responsibility for a case like this offered a reassuring familiarity. He was still uncertain about his motive for coming to San Francisco. It could have been to prove that Leonard, and Seeley's own deepest fears, were wrong, that his professional edge was as sharp as ever. Or perhaps it was no more complicated than escaping the onset of another gray Buffalo winter which, if it was like the last one, would hold a perfect mirror to his soul. In either case, coming to San Francisco was the only way he was going to find out.
Before leaving Buffalo, Seeley spent a week of eighteen-hour days working through the binders that Palmieri express-shipped to him, all the while arranging continuances for his cases in the state and county courts. By the end of the week, as he began to connect the jigsaw pieces of Vaxtek's case, Seeley had a good measure of Pearsall's qualities as a lawyer. He would not have assembled the case the same way, but neither could he find anything to fault in the shrewd care with which Pearsall had gathered his facts and witnesses.
Pearsall's secretary, assigned to Seeley for the duration of the trial, came into the conference room while he was rechecking the witness list to locate a misplaced deposition binder. Christina Hoff couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, young to have worked for a partner as senior as Pearsall, and in her neat skirt and oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, was mostly elbows and knees. She had shown him around the firm's five floors of offices when he arrived earlier in the morning, and although she had touched up her makeup, it still failed to mask the bleariness in her eyes, from fatigue, Seeley thought, or grief.
“I just wanted to see if you needed anything.” She had a nice voice.
“Should I call you Christina or Tina?”
“Tina. How'd you know?”
She was almost six feet tall, just an inch or two shorter than Seeley, and he guessed that, as a gawky adolescent, the
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