“This case appears to be the end of a marriage,” said Santa Clara Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg, before the start of the Hewlett Packard v. Oracle bench trial.  With that statement, we can see the narrative context within which he will interpret some relatively vague contract language to decide whether there is a viable contract that binds the two parties.  Given the acrimony and emotional furor throughout the case, it seems apt.

Judges may be fine legal scholars, but they are humans first and...

Here at the OpenDOAR blog, we are hardcore strategy fans, and not just when it comes to trial strategy.  We are game theorists who especially love extreme strategy, by which we mean strategies that are so ambitious and outside of the norm that they change the very game they are in.

Today we have an example for you from far outside the world of trial strategy.  In Great Britain, there is a game show called “Golden Balls” in which contestants engage in a variation of...

Early on May 1, 2012:  Before the attacks of September 11, 2001, many Americans may have been willing to agree that one person’s terrorist was another person’s freedom fighter.  Certainly, I remember being moved by the politics and the philosophy of the Irish Republican Army members accused of gun running during one of the first cases I worked on as a trial strategy consultant in the early 1980’s.  They spoke of similarities between the restrictive ways in which the British treated the Irish and the ways they...

Read the original post on Baker Hostetler’s Class Action Lawsuit Defense blog.

As class certification hearings in labor and employment cases and other types of class action litigation have become more like mini-trials in the wake of recent case law, strategies that used to be applied at the jury trial phase have moved to the class certification stage.  Both the plaintiff and defense sides of class action cases are approaching class certification hearings as if they were short, compact trials...