I’ll leave it to the likes of Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold to complain incessantly over the next few weeks about not knowing enough about Harriet Miers, President Bush’s most recent nominee to the Supreme Court.
A look over the cases in which Miers has been involved as an attorney is scant on the topic of the law as it relates to technology. However, a quick search reveals that Miers and her Dallas firm Locke Liddel & Sapp have represented such heavyweights as Microsoft and RealNetworks. Notable decisions in cases where Miers was among the counsel of record include:
Microsoft Corp. v. Manning, 914 S.W.2d 602 (Tex.App. 1995) – Microsoft lost an appeal of the lower court’s grant of class certification in an action alleging breach of warranty, unjust enrichment, violations of the Magnuson-Moss Act, and violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act. The underlying action dealt with issues surrounding disk compression technology embodied in Microsoft’s 1993 release of MS-DOS 6.0.
Shaw v. Broadcast.com, Inc. 2005 WL 2095770 (N.D. Tex., August 30, 2005) – Defendants Broadcast.com, Inc., Realnetworks, Inc. and Microsoft (represented by, among others, Miers) were awarded summary judgment in a patent infringement lawsuit brought by owners of a patent dealing with efficient transmission of streaming media.