The Local, page 3
“A pleasure, Ms. Stills.”
“Layla joined us at Gordon & Greene last month.”
“It’s always nice to meet a new associate,” I said.
“I’m counsel, as a matter of fact.”
The difference meant something, and I liked that she felt compelled to highlight it. She, too, was probably a couple years younger than I was. If she had joined Gordon & Greene on the partner track, she must have had an impressive résumé.
“Is your background in IP?” I asked.
“Criminal law,” she answered.
Abe jumped in. “Layla was an AUSA in DC for seven years. She’s got more time in court than you and I combined.” I admired the way he always looked out for his people.
I took a seat across from Amir. Layla sat beside him while Abe positioned himself at the head of the table, between me and his client.
“So what brings you to Marshall, Mr. Zawar?” I needed to get the meeting started.
“It’s not your Southern hospitality,” he said with more than a hint of indignation. This didn’t faze me. No one likes being sued, and most clients despised being sued in EDTX.
“Jimmy, Amir created a company called Medallion. There was a big profile last month in The New Yorker; maybe you saw it?” I shook my head. I didn’t want to insult the man by admitting I hadn’t heard of him, but it was better not to begin with a lie. “Why don’t you tell him about it, Amir?”
“My father came to this country from Karachi, Pakistan, when he was nineteen years old. He drove a taxi in New York City for almost four decades. He worked every day of his life to earn his piece of the American dream.” As Amir described his background and highlighted the pertinent details that would become ingredients for his future business ventures, I figured he’d told this story before. But it didn’t feel overly rehearsed. His occupation was more than a job; it was a calling. I was also struck by Amir’s sincere admiration for his old man. It was a feeling so foreign to me that I had to remind myself that his was authentic.
Over the next ten minutes, Amir told me all about his father’s life. He had arrived in New York in the early eighties and found work driving a cab. For a quarter of a century, he saved every dollar he could with two goals in mind. The first was sending his son to college. The second was one day becoming his own boss. For a driver in the Big Apple, that meant owning a taxi medallion.
The city of New York issued a limited number of medallions and you couldn’t drive a cab without one. As the years passed and the population grew, medallions became more and more valuable. By the twenty-first century, a taxi medallion was seen not just as a license to own a cab but as a piece of equity that would appreciate over time. Most medallions were controlled by a handful of companies, but if an individual driver could scrape together enough money to buy one himself, it could be his ticket to financial independence.
“In 2006, my father took out a loan and purchased a medallion, using all of his meager savings for the down payment,” Amir continued. “He was, in his mind, working for himself now. He had to make loan payments every month, but this was just like paying the mortgage on a house. Eventually, he would own it outright, or so he thought.”
Wherever there is honest money being made there are dishonest people scamming for their unfair share. The predatory loans in the medallion industry put the housing loans of that era to shame. Amir’s father, like so many, was an easy mark for those unregulated companies awarding loans to mostly immigrant drivers, some of whom couldn’t read the English in which the loans were written.
“For the next eight years, my father took in $6,000 per month, $4,500 of which went to paying off his loan. It was steep, but at least the value of the medallion was going up. He had purchased the medallion for $650,000. Eight years later, they were going at auctions for $1.1 million. So my dad’s net worth rested not on his income but rather on what percentage of his medallion he owned. Tragically, he would discover that he didn’t own it at all.”
Amir’s father had unwittingly been put on an interest-only loan payment plan. In eight years, he hadn’t paid off a single dollar of the principal. To make matters exponentially worse, right around the time he and scores of other drivers like him were discovering the truth behind the shady loans they’d signed, the bubble burst. Medallion prices that had skyrocketed for decades began to plummet. The lucky drivers were the ones who got out just in time, defaulting on their loans and simply walking away with nothing. The unlucky ones were on the hook for million-dollar loans while their medallions were suddenly worth less than a third of that. They were underwater with no hope of resurfacing. Savings vanished, and families were ruined. More than a few drivers took their own lives. Others, like Amir’s father, were simply broken. His health declined rapidly as the bills piled up and threats of foreclosure weighed heavily on his mind. By the time he passed away, he had become a shell of his former self.
“Predatory lending I understand, but what caused the bubble to burst?” I asked.
“Uber,” said Abe, who hadn’t spoken for several minutes.
“Rideshare apps,” Amir clarified, “did massive damage to the taxi industry. Men like my father had been the lifeblood of cities like New York. Then, almost overnight, they were kneecapped, undercut by Silicon Valley.”
If I had read the profile in The New Yorker, I would have known the rest of the story. Amir had three semesters at Caltech under his belt when his dad’s financial problems began. Unable to cover tuition, Amir was forced to drop out. He managed to find work as a programmer in California, though. Then, after he buried his father, Amir had an idea.
“I created Medallion because I believe that the gig economy must embrace the people it generally displaces. My mission is to build an organization that welcomes in workers like my father.” As a general rule, I didn’t like Silicon Valley bros, but I had to admit that Amir was a compelling figure.
“I saw that Uber and Lyft were decimating the taxicab industry in cities all across America,” he continued. “So I developed an app that would give customers the convenience of a rideshare service with the reliability of a professional taxi company.”
“Doesn’t New York City already require a special license for rideshare drivers?” I asked, failing to see the novelty of the idea.
“That’s merely a way to limit the number of cars on the streets,” Amir responded, “but to the customer, there’s no difference at all. You’re still likely to end up in the back of a college student’s beat-up Hyundai Sonata. There are passengers who want a truly professional experience, from the driver behind the wheel to the vehicle itself. The problem is that it’s more convenient to order a car from your phone than to stand on the street and hail a cab. What Medallion does is take licensed taxi drivers and their cabs and transform them into a rideshare service. Operators can drive as they usually would, picking up random passengers on the street, or when they want assistance finding customers, they can turn on the app and be paired with riders. Rather than displacing an entire sector that helped build this country, we made taxi drivers an essential component of our service.”
It was an ingenious twist on a popular idea. It was also the kind of alteration to protected intellectual property that so often found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit in Marshall.
“So what can I do for you, Mr. Zawar?” I asked, hoping to get down to brass tacks before I had to return to court. Instead of answering me, he looked at Abe to respond.
“Several suits have been brought against Medallion. Today’s hearing involves the first of many. The claimant is a software company called Astral that designed a navigation program that, it claims, Medallion’s software infringed on. We’ve got an eligibility hearing this afternoon, and trial is set for April.”
“If there is a trial,” added Amir.
My eyes met Abe’s. This client was hopeful. Someone needed to administer a dose of reality. Abe ran his hand through his long hair, an unconscious gesture intended to lower his blood pressure. “That is one thing we wanted to discuss with you,” Abe started. “Amir is insistent that if the case is not dismissed today we should ask for a change of venue.”
A motion for a change of venue can be brought for a variety of reasons, but typically lawyers do this when they believe that a case either belongs in a different jurisdiction or that the jurisdiction in question cannot render impartial justice because of some inherent bias. Patent defendants have been complaining about being sued in EDTX for twenty years, but changes of venue were never granted. They also irritated Judge Gardner.
“You don’t want to do that,” I said. “It’ll be denied, and you’ll insult the judge.”
“So if the case isn’t dropped today, we just accept that we’re going to trial?” Amir asked.
“The case won’t be dropped, Mr. Zawar.” It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but it was better to be honest with a client, especially when he was only hours away from discovering that I was right.
“A lot of good it does having the best lawyer in town.” Amir’s tone changed, no longer attempting to conceal his contempt. “What does that title get you, anyway? A blue ribbon at the county fair?”
“Amir,” Abe said, “let’s keep going.”
“Medallion has no affiliation with this town,” he continued. “I’d never even heard of this place until I got sued. My company doesn’t do business in this shithole. So can we at least stop pretending that my presence here is in any way appropriate?”
Amir’s grievances were nothing new. Medallion was joining a club of frustrated defendants from companies like Apple and Boeing to Xerox and Zappos. None wanted to belong to this group, but most had accepted that there wasn’t much they could do about it. It was the cost of doing business in America.
“I understand that no one likes being party to a lawsuit, and it compounds your resentment when it takes you away from home. But patent litigation is our specialty,” I said, referring to the collection of lawyers at the table, “so you should take some comfort in knowing that you’re in good hands.”
“Medallion has a pilot program in eight cities right now. By Q3 of next year, we will have doubled that. I should be tending to the demands of my business, not wasting away here in Mayberry getting sued by every rideshare company and navigation software developer from Silicon Valley,” Amir said. “My father busted his ass to try to get ahead. He did everything that was ever asked of him, and then the system screwed him over. I won’t allow that to happen to me.”
There were two sides to Amir Zawar. The first was the creator, the visionary who had founded a burgeoning empire that would have made his father proud. The second was the defendant, the man who resented being accused of theft and whose business was under attack. Amir seemed to switch from one to the other as easily as a faucet turns from hot to cold. There was a chip on his shoulder, and it clearly motivated him to succeed. It also told him to fight when his back was up against the wall. I found myself drawn to him, though the fact remained that my least favorite part of practicing law was the clients.
“Look, Amir, I hear what you’re saying. Your frustration is understandable. But you’ve got to let Abe do what he does best. Start with the eligibility hearing. It almost certainly won’t go your way, but then you’ll have a Markman hearing. That will determine the meaning of the terms in the patent itself and, if that goes well, might even dissuade others from filing similar suits against you. There are several battles along the way before we ever get to trial. So my advice is to keep your head about you and to let your legal team do what it was designed to do.”
“And I should make you part of this team?” he asked.
“Well, you’re going to need a local counsel—”
“Because Abe doesn’t speak hillbilly?” Amir asked.
I let out a little smile. “Actually, Amir, here in Marshall we speak redneck. Hillbilly is a dialect you’d find farther east. But to answer your question, yes, it will benefit you to have someone with my skill set at your disposal.”
“And how much is it going to cost me to have you persuade your ignorant neighbors by making a little speech about your missing truck?”
Amir wasn’t the first person to call into question my value as local counsel. As he would find out either the easy way or the hard way, though, a local was absolutely essential to his defense.
“Everyone seems to forget that simple people know the rest of the world thinks they’re simple,” I said. “Consider this for a moment, Amir. Any time we have an election in this country that breaks in a way no one expected, experts from LA to New York are baffled by these unpredictable swing voters. It always makes me wonder, if you’re all so fucking smart out there on the coasts, and we’re all so fucking simple down here, why can’t you figure us out?” This wasn’t my normal sales pitch, but Amir didn’t strike me as a typical client.
“Jurors are human lie detectors,” I continued. “They instinctually sift through all the jargon and all the bullshit to get to the core of a case. They’ll never fully understand how your software crowdsources users’ geotracking to provide optimal real-time navigational routing. It will never be clear to them whether the interface of your app is novel or if it was built by replicating entire blocks of code pilfered from other rideshare programs. But you’re right about one thing, Amir. The fate of your company will ultimately be in the hands of ordinary citizens from Marshall, Texas. They won’t trust you one bit, and you shouldn’t trust them either. This has been my home since I was a kid. Marshall is in my blood. I will be your advocate. It will be my job to make sure that they see you as a man who built his own company from the ground up rather than as a thief who took something that didn’t belong to him in the first place. They will trust me, Amir, because they are me, and I am them.”
My phone buzzed, but I held Amir’s gaze for an extra beat just to make sure he’d heard me. Then I checked my text. “I’ve got to get back,” I said. “They’ve reached a verdict.”
· Four ·
There’s nothing quite like the feeling in a courtroom right before a jury delivers its decision. My client fidgeted with her fingers, a nervous habit that likely didn’t help her arthritis. Even the Chicago lawyers seemed jittery. As we waited for Judge Gardner, I heard the rear door of the courtroom close. Abe, Layla, and Amir entered and returned to their seats. I figured this was promising news for me. Amir hadn’t agreed to add me to his team, but he was intrigued and wanted to see for himself if I could deliver the goods.
Judge Gardner took his seat and then had the bailiff bring in the jury. For some reason, jurors instinctively put on their best poker faces right before a verdict is read. Maybe it’s because they’ve seen enough legal shows on TV to know they should milk the suspense of the moment.
I’ve always been competitive by nature, so my desire to win was independent of any windfall that might come my way, though I can’t say that money wasn’t also on my mind at that moment. My fee arrangements varied depending on the case. Sometimes, I simply made my fixed hourly rate and left it at that. Other times, depending on a variety of factors, I worked on contingency, meaning I only got paid if we won. My workload had been particularly busy that year and I had been in high demand. The Chicago lawyers had lobbied aggressively to get me, and so, in exchange for my services, we worked out an alternate fee arrangement in which I would get 3 percent of the total damages, should we prevail.
The foreman was an older man, and I’d fought hard to keep him on the jury. He had done backbreaking construction work his whole life, and I’d had a hunch he’d be sympathetic to anyone who was getting screwed over by a corporation. Judge Gardner asked if they’d reached a verdict, and the foreman stood up and declared, “We have, Your Honor.” The courtroom clerk approached him, took the paper with the verdict from his hands, and walked it over to the judge. The verdict form had three pages. The first two pages included my client’s claims and the jury’s findings. The third page was for the award, assuming there was one. If the jury found that the claims were invalid, that my client’s patent had not been violated, then the third page would be blank. As Judge Gardner flipped from the second page to the third, I zeroed in on his eyes. He read the words closely and then read them again. Something was written on that last page. That was good news for us.
Gardner handed the verdict back to the courtroom clerk, and she turned to face us as she read. “ ‘We the jury, in the matter of Marta Sexton versus Syracuse Pharmaceuticals, et al., find in favor of the plaintiff.’ ” I clenched my fist in private celebration, and my client let out a joyous cry. After reading through the claims and the guilty verdicts attached, the clerk turned to the third page. “ ‘We hereby award the defendant to pay damages in the amount of $23.5 million.’ ”
Math was never my strong suit, but I did the calculation as quickly as possible. I would clear three-quarters of a million dollars for the law firm of Me, Myself & I. Somewhere in my near future there were champagne corks popping.
Judge Gardner thanked the jurors for their service and dismissed them. I gave a grateful nod in their direction as well. Not only had they just handed me a victory, but I had a feeling that this verdict was going to pay dividends almost immediately with my private audience in the back of the courtroom.
Mrs. Sexton took my hand in both of hers. As she squeezed my palm to show her appreciation, I thought of her arthritis and how joy can help all of us overcome pain. Money doesn’t hurt either. I congratulated my colleagues and agreed to meet them for dinner to celebrate. As I headed for the door, Amir Zawar stopped me.
“Mr. Euchre, I’m trying to build something with Medallion, something that proves there’s a better way for this world to treat people. If all it takes is a couple of lawsuits to completely destroy a man’s work, then something is rotten in the state of Texas.”
