Google Seeks $4 Million In Legal Fees From Oracle

by Mike on July 11, 2012

Going to court can be an expensive decision and one that should never be taken lightly. When you factor in the amount of money that might be spend on lawyers, court fees, investigative fees as well as the time commitment, you better be pretty sure that you have a strong case.

Unless the two parties settle out of court, there will generally be a winner and a loser and if you just so happen to be on the losing side, it can be a real downer. Not only have you lost all of your investment or any ability to win any compensation through the court case, but there’s a good chance that you are going to have to pay the legal fees of the winning party. Google and Oracle are two big names with deep pockets and both sides have invested a lot of time and money in a patent infringement suit. Brought on by Oracle, the suit claimed that Google was in violation of many patents. Unfortunately for Oracle however, the judge didn’t see it this way and threw the case out of court. As Google is now the “prevailing party”, it is their right to recover their legal costs and as such have petitioned the court for $4 million from Oracle.

Now, you may think that a big portion of this cost would be associated to lawyer fees, but strangely enough, $2.9 million of the total claim is from photocopying and collecting all of the documents that were required. Get this, in total, 97 million documents were requested from Google to move this trial along. There are no details as to just how long this phase of the trial will go on for, but we will keep you posted.

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