Ahem...
They are Samsung's lawyers. They were hired by Samsung to receive and review documents from Apple that Samsung wasn't allowed to see.
If I received stuff like that in my email, I would have the choice of dropping what I'm doing, and asking my manager what to do, or dropping what I'm doing and calling someone in our legal department for advice what to do. That's what anybody working in a company that tries to behave legally and ethically correct is trained and expected to do. Even if the stuff didn't come from lawyers that my company hired, which just made things ten times worse.
This is business, not the school yard.
So...let me get this straight. You believe lawfirms have no duty in upholding the law? Samsung could ask for it all they want. The lawfirm should still say no. It is like me hiring an accountant to do my work. If I want the accountant to do something illegal, and they do it, they're in trouble, too.
In this case, Samsung wasn't stealing money from itself and reporting it incorrectly. Nor were they stealing directly from anyone-no internal stockholder was hurt or anything. The leak came from the lawfirm and the lawfirm should have serious consequences against it.
For instance, you hire me to do a job, and then you ask me to do something illegal. It is my duty to say no.
You're trying very, very hard defending Samsung.
Samsung executives knew of the lawsuit against Apple. They knew that they weren't supposed to look at the Apple documents, and they did anyways. And to Samsung's gain on contract negotiation with a 3rd party, Nokia.
How is Samsung to actually know what they were seeing until after they saw it? A normal business works this way.
Oh, look, a document.
Oh wait, I'm not sure what I just read. Meeting to review.
OK, we just looked at something that wasn't supposed to be shared with us. But...we didn't actually share it with us.
I'm still having problems figuring out why this is a problem for Samsung ethically. If it was a problem for Nokia that Samsung was trying to match terms with Apple, then Nokia should sue the leaker of information, ie: The lawfirm.
It isn't that I'm trying very hard to defend Samsung. What they did...seems rather normal to me in normal business. People get information, they use information. I've worked with confidential information. If I had leaked it, my head is on the line, not the receiver, unless they use it to do something illegal. Getting a better deal by citing deals isn't illegal.
This is very simple. It is known that the law firm shared the information. What is not (yet) known is why and in what circumstances. What is also known is that the court ordered that this information be made available for the eyes of the law firm only, and that Samsung knew this. If Samsung requested this information from the lawyers, they are in trouble because they knew they weren't entitled to have the information. If they didn't request the information they are still in trouble because once in possession of the information they knew they were specifically excluded by the court from having access to, they failed to notify the court and instead used that information for the precise purpose the court had excluded them from having it for.
Samsung was not, and is not an interested party. They were an involved party to the lawsuit from which this information derived. As an involved party they are responsible to the court for their actions relating to the court and the case.
So far as the case is concerned, they're not an interested party. For business, you bet they're interested in seeing what deals they can get.
I again must reissue: Without legal advise, how would Samsung know what information they were and weren't allowed to see? "Everything leaks"-I want to see a transcript with that, because that might be "Everything gets reported"-in the sense that, the executives had known about deals.
Remember, Samsung WAS entitled to certain, but not all knowledge. That was what the lawfirm was supposed to share with them. If Samsung got the entire deal, again, perhaps their interpretation was it was shared because the entire deal was sharable.
I think all responsibility is with the firm...I don't see much basis to go after Samsung here. Even if they hired a firm known for this type of behavior-the firm shouldn't have existed before this incident due to such behavior.
Maybe Samsung did something illegal, but so far as I can see, it is much ado about nothing and rooting for a football team...the "DEATH TO SAMSUNG APPLE TO VICTORY" type thing.