Lawyers and observers packing the courtroom for the Oracle v. Google showdown are getting a tour of of U.S. District Judge William Alsup's tight ship.
The morning started with a Google lawyer trying to keep some sensitive Google financial information private when CEO Larry Page testifies.
"Oh, come on," Alsup grumbled. "This is a public trial."
"Your honor."
"Denied."
"Your honor, it's ..."
"Denied."
And pity the lawyer with a tickle in his throat. During voir dire, someone at the Google table started coughing."Who is hacking and coughing?" Alsup demanded.
He offered a lozenge, which Robert Van Nest, big-shot litigator at Keker & Van Nest, picked up and handed to someone at his table.
Alsup was back on message Tuesday. "I have a strong view," that when a lawyer is speaking, they have the "absolute right for full attention" without "hacking or coughing or paper shuffling."
"I don't even like it when people get up and back and forth out that door," he said, prompting one observer to slip out before things got underway.
Later, Alsup stopped proceedings because someone was typing too loudly. Alsup assured Van Nest it wasn't his people, but the press. (Alsup, like other judges have done in recent years, is allowing reporters to use laptops and other devices during the trial).
He warned the throng furiously typing up notes, blog items and Tweets to take a gentle hand to their keyboards.
After that, court security made at least three reporters shut down their machines. And one lawyer in the audience was told to stop clicking his pen.
While lawyers like to say Alsup is a judge who "lets you try your case," he also lets you hear his thougthts about it. At one point, he asked Morrison & Foerster's Michael Jacobs, who represents Oracle, about the order of his witnesses.
"You're going to start out a trial with a video deposition?" Alsup said, with evident disapproval.
But Alsup actually thinks highly of Jacobs, Van Nest and their teams. "In some ways," he told jurors on opening day, "you're lucky to see a trial where the lawyering is at the level that it is."
This reminds me of an episode of the old "Lou Grant" TV show, which was about a newspaper reporter who was fired from a TV station (yes, it was WJM-TV) and who went to work as an editor a Los Angeles newspaper.
One of his reporters tells him about a local judge that was very strict about observers in his courtroom. To see for himself, he went to the courtroom, saw some things that were a bit disturbing, and then tried to leave. The judge would not let him and had him arrested and imprisoned. The rest of the hour-long show was about his difficulty in getting released.
Posted by: alc | April 18, 2012 at 02:23 PM
I love the "Lou Grant" TV show. It was on the oldies TV station when I was a kid. Maybe that's where I got the idea to be a journalist.
Posted by: Ginny LaRoe | May 01, 2012 at 04:58 PM
Uno de sus reporteros le habla de un juez local que era muy estricto en cuanto a los observadores en la sala de audiencias. Para ver por sí mismo, se dirigió a la sala del tribunal
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