Thirty years ago today
Posted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:49 pm
Thirty years ago today, I was literally on the eve of trial. Our client's patent infringement lawsuit against Microsoft was scheduled to start in federal court the next day. As you might expect, I'd been working through the weekend and was more or less exhausted. Yet I found myself awake around 4:30 in the morning.
At first, I thought it was a truck or something. But as the shaking continued, I realized I was experiencing my first major earthquake. There was nothing by my bed that threatened to fall on me, so I just stayed put. And when the shaking eventually stopped, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
That didn't work. I was certainly tired enough, but aftershocks shook my bed two or three times after the initial quake. When I started seeing light through the bedroom window, I gave up and got out of bed. I discovered a fair amount of disorder in the apartment, as the shaking had been hard enough to dislodge items from their perches and send them to the floor. Nothing major, though, so I stepped outside. I found a bunch of my neighbors who exclaimed, "Bob! Thank God you're okay!"
And that's how I experienced the Northridge earthquake of 1994.
I didn't get any work done that day. But our office was open the next day and the trial started on time. It finished three weeks later with a jury verdict in our client's favor for $120 million. Still the biggest case of my career. --Bob
At first, I thought it was a truck or something. But as the shaking continued, I realized I was experiencing my first major earthquake. There was nothing by my bed that threatened to fall on me, so I just stayed put. And when the shaking eventually stopped, I rolled over and tried to go back to sleep.
That didn't work. I was certainly tired enough, but aftershocks shook my bed two or three times after the initial quake. When I started seeing light through the bedroom window, I gave up and got out of bed. I discovered a fair amount of disorder in the apartment, as the shaking had been hard enough to dislodge items from their perches and send them to the floor. Nothing major, though, so I stepped outside. I found a bunch of my neighbors who exclaimed, "Bob! Thank God you're okay!"
And that's how I experienced the Northridge earthquake of 1994.
I didn't get any work done that day. But our office was open the next day and the trial started on time. It finished three weeks later with a jury verdict in our client's favor for $120 million. Still the biggest case of my career. --Bob