Next, Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals might see its day of reckoning at long last!
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This one I stole from engineering. It works better with a visual so I usually call someone from the attendees up to the podium area, and position them facing me at a conversational-type distance.
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Most patent attorneys are fairly introverted, but there are a minority of extraverts among us. How can you tell which is which? [looking my guest in the eyes at this point]
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(Guest (hopefully) says, “I don’t know, how?”)
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Well, when the introverted patent attorney talks to you, he stares down at his shoes. [I say this while staring exaggeratedly down at my shoes] But when the extraverted patent attorney talks to you, he looks all the way over at your shoes.
This one’s for engineers and lawyers both. Engineer and lawyer meet on a vacation cruise and discover while chatting that both of them were able to take the trip due to a house-destroying natural disaster, and being over-insured on their respective homes. The lawyer explains that his was a house fire. The engineer explained his was due to a flood.
“Flood??”, the lawyer says, taken aback, “How in the world did you start a flood??”
(OK, I’m done. Sorry OP for threaderailment)
Did you sue the laptop maker?
Aww. Cute.
I think this (the Velveeta case) is an attempt to see how much cash they can grab. There was a piece on 60 minutes way back when (20 yrs maybe?) that may have been inspired by the McD’s case, It was all about frivolous suits. The ladder company warnings I found reasonable. The dinnerware company sued by the guy who stacked the dishes upside down in his kitchen cabinet & they fell hurting him-- I was boggled by…really?
My fav Lawyer Joke:
A young lawyer is working late one night in his office at Wolfram & Hart. The devil appears and says “I’ll make you a partner, rich, have a long life w/ no illness. In return I want your soul, the soul of your wife, & the soul of your first born child!” The lawyer sits there scratching his chin for a long time & says “Okay, I give up. What’s the catch?”
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Angel reference. nice.
Undoubtedly. This is the same ‘business model’ as patent trolls. Buy up a bunch of vague and poorly worded, possibly improperly granted patents. Interpret them as broadly as possible. Have a P.O. Box in Richardson, TX where the judges are, for my$teriou$ reasons, very favorable to these suits. Then threaten to sue every company you can for a jillion-squillion dollarydoos unless they pay a settlement. Threaten them with onerous filing that will drive up their legal costs to MORE than the settlement number they offer. Smaller companies with shallow pockets might pay a significant amount just to avoid the hassle/uncertainty. A corp with really DEEP pockets MIGHT decide to pay them off to make them go away, but sometimes, in the case of predatory d-bags like these, figure they’ll just sic their multi-million dollar legal staff on 'em and show them what ‘onerous’ really means.
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Very good, sounds like you also have been around the block a few times in the EDTX. But I added one small suggestion to your quote above.
The other thankfully short-lived cottage industry* was the patent “expiration date” trolls. We had 10 of those suits going at the same time. We settled none of them, and lost none of them (sometimes the LLC plaintiff would just disappear into the mist once they figured out we were going to cost them some effort). One big help was given the nature of the suit, with the plaintiff supposedly standing in the shoes of a government prosecutor, they could not demand a jury to hoodwink.
[*] Thank you (not) Randall Rader. 
To be clear I am not a lawyer and don’t play one on tv or anywhere else. I’m a computer programmer and artist that does work for animation and visual effects. But I kept up pretty religiously with the parent troll wars of the early 2000’s, esp the the case where someone was trying to sue every podcaster in existence armed with a 60’s-70’s era patent for recording a radio show and mailing the cassette tape to subscribers.
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