Overmoroned

From overlawyered.com comes a wonderful example of homegrown American idiocy:

In the late 1930s, Edward Kasner was asked to come up with the name for a large number; as legend has it, he asked his nine-year old nephew, who said "googol," and Kasner's 1940 book "Mathematics and the Imagination" popularized the term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. Over a half century later, a variation of that word was used to name a popular search engine, which you may have heard is going public in an e billion dollar offering.

Now Kasner's great-niece, Peri Fleisher, is going public herself, complaining that her family hasn't been compensated for Google's choice of a name, and "exploring" the possibility of legal action.

Stupid? You bet. Blame Peri Fleisher's great-uncle for not passing down his giant brain through the generations. But don't blame the American legal system, which as far as I can tell, is blameless. (The original link is from the Baltimore Sun.)

Meanwhile, according to this account from Law.com, Google is adding lawyers to its legal staff at an alarming rate. Is Google becoming overlawyered in order to prepare for the Fleishers of the world? Maybe so. If Google's recruiting materials are any indication, the Google lawyers will have no trouble understanding Fleisher's precedent-flouting legal thinking:

"Practice law Google-style," reads the section of Google's Web site dedicated to its legal recruiting. "Come work at a place where you can help define precedents, rather than just follow them."

Comments

[Kevin]

Unless they are self insured you can expect that most of those lawyers will just be pushing paper and reviewing contracts. The real lawyering will be done by whoever their insurance company appoints.