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["clanSkeen" <sgian AT planetc.com>]

Toni

>"While obviously a factor ?"
>Fella, when you run out of money there
>*is* *no* other case *but* *this* case.

If what you mean by this is that how much money you have is always the
deciding factor in court, who has the 'better' attorney is what wins cases,
... sorry, not always true.

Court decisions are decided on more than just the skill of the attorney.  I
know this is the common myth, but reality shows otherwise.  Pecedents,
behavior of appeals courts, popular sentiment, etc. all influence what
happens.

To give you an example with which I am intimately familiar:   In the past
few decades large pharmaceutical companies made the bulk of their heafty
profits from Product Line Extensions (PLE's), a drug they would patent and
when the patent was near expiring, they'd patent some tiny step in the
process, or some insignificant thing such as the milling process or tablet
press dies, and they'd routinely get a patent to sell the drug exclusively
for another decade and a half or so.  Small drug manufacturers would
challange these creative patent extensions and routinely loose.  The courts
and government favored the extensions and the big companies have very, very
deep pockets.  When geezers and prescription adicts kept complaining about
the high cost of drugs, the sentiment changed.   In several key decisions
challanging patent extensions, small poor drug companies went to court with
huge giants like Pfizer and GSK who had billions to spend defending the
patents.  The small companies WON.  And they continue to win with such
regularity that in spite of some of the deepest pockets on earth, they no
longer even bother to go to court to defend challanges to their PLE's.

The same would happen with defending one sided contracts.  It only takes a
few wins to set precedent, and these would probably be won by advocacy
groups rather than individuals.

James




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