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http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0704190577apr20,0,712574.story?coll=chi-business-hed

Motorola must pay $23 million to lawyers
Judge finds company cheated during trial

From Tribune news services
Published April 20, 2007


FT. LAUDERDALE -- Motorola Inc. must pay $22.9 million to Willie Gary and other lawyers who sued the company in a trade-secrets case that ended in a mistrial, a Florida judge ruled Thursday.

Judge Leroy Moe granted $20 million in fees and $2.9 million in costs. Motorola, which said it will appeal the ruling, must pay the other side's legal bills as punishment for letting witnesses read transcripts of prior testimony before taking the stand.

Motorola's violation "goes right to the heart of the civil justice system and it certainly has to be addressed," Moe said Thursday.

Gary had asked for $11,000 an hour, or $24.5 million, for 2,231.5 hours of work, and had asked the judge to triple his team's total fees to $93.5 million. Moe did not discuss hourly rates or say how the money is to be divided. If two-thirds of the fee award is for Gary personally, as he proposed, he is to be paid about $6,000 an hour.

"I feel the judge sent a message to corporate America and to Motorola that you can't cheat and get away with it," Gary said after the ruling.

"This is a huge win for Motorola," the company's lead attorney, Faith Gay, said, hugging Gary in the courtroom. "You walked out with peanuts."

"You got busted," Gary replied.

SPS Technologies, which Gary represented, also sought a $100 million restitution penalty, which the judge did not mention when ruling. Gary can file a motion to have the judge address that issue specifically.

The jury deadlocked in November after a seven-week trial over claims by SPS, a defunct Florida company, that Schaumburg-based Motorola stole its technology for tracking vehicles and withdrew from a joint venture, putting it out of business. No retrial date has been set.

After the trial Moe said he would sanction Motorola by ordering it to pay "reasonable" bills submitted by Gary and his team of attorneys.

In the lawsuit SPS said the planned joint venture would have developed a system combining roadside motorist assistance with a satellite global positioning system.

Gary asked the jury to award his client $10 billion in damages, 10 percent of the maximum value placed on the venture by Motorola's accountants.

The six-member panel was equally divided on its fourth day of deliberations, and Moe declared a mistrial.

Gary testified in the fee hearing that his firm took the case when no one else would and spent five years poring over more than 500,000 documents to prepare for trial before Motorola "cheated."

"They knew they were going down," Gary said during closing arguments Thursday. "We wouldn't even be here if they had played fair."

But Gay and other Motorola attorneys argued that the trial was not going as well as SPS' lawyers thought and that they failed to follow proper procedures established by case law in asking for the fees and costs.

"They asked for all these fees in a case that your honor said was difficult, very difficult," Gay said during her closing arguments. "They're here asking your honor essentially for a do-over."

Fee expert Robert Montgomery, a Florida personal-injury lawyer, testified on behalf of Gary's firm. He said the lawyer was owed as much as $2 billion, half the 40 percent contingency fee he would have received had he won all he asked.

The rates for other lawyers on the team ranged from $100 to $1,000 an hour, according to court filings.

John Locke, a Motorola expert witness, admitted to having read transcripts of previous testimony the day after Moe had admonished the company for providing transcripts to another expert witness.

Gary is a prominent trial lawyer who travels in a custom-fitted Boeing 737 dubbed "Wings of Justice II."During Thursday's hearing Motorola's lawyers and even the judge referred to Gary as a "superstar" and a "legend."