Microsoft: We Need More Lawyers To Sue Us

Microsoft's chief lawyer Brad Smith is still in the thick of negotiations with the European Union over opening Windows Vista to competitors, the follow-on to anti-trust rulings that cost the software giant hundreds of millions in fines in 2004. It's only one of the legal fronts for Microsoft, which files 2,000 lawsuits a year in over 100 countries and probably gets sued about that many times a year as well.

So, why did Smith just tell (.pdf) a conference of lawyers that the world does not have enough lawyers? Is he suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?

Answers and the possibility that the U.S. faces a lawyer gap after the jump...

It really doesn't. At least many parts of the world do not. And if you want to put this into perspective, think about this. The next time you drive down Pennsylvania Avenue and you look at the office buildings, if you're driving during working hours on a working day, there are more lawyers in any one of those office buildings than in the entire nation of Cambodia. And if you turn up Connecticut Avenue and do the same thing, you'll see building after building, and in each of those buildings, there are more lawyers in each building than in the entire country of Mozambique.

And we have this great heritage, a heritage that started in France in the 1600s that spread to the United States in the 1700s and is increasingly recognized around the world. And yet we need to do more. I think we in the business community have a particular opportunity to help spread the word that if countries want to grow economically, if they want to create better futures for their people, if they want to build new jobs, the independence of the judiciary in fact plays a critical role in economic development.

Regulators are the new diplomats of our time, Smith told the American Society of International Law at its conference on November 3.

We effectively had to negotiate with antitrust regulators in country after country on continent after continent, in an atmosphere where the antitrust legal rules are quite unsettled in terms of their application to this kind of technology, in an atmosphere where regulators wanted to address the very specific product features that were being added and consider regulating them in very, very precise ways down to the precise words that would be used in particular commands.

And we've looked at other ways to enhance international coordination by contributing and implementing when adopted new ideas so that governments could rely at times, even in a federalist society like that of the United States, on a single joint group of engineers to give advice to multiple regulatory agencies, to help bridge the gap across governments.

Smith might need to spread the word about the need for international cooperation to the United States government, who has found itself in an conundrum over its virtual ban on internet gambling, despite having domestic loopholes for horse racing.

It seems that Antigua, an island with more than its fair share of internet gambling companies, got the World Trade Organization to declare the ban unfair. The U.S. is basically ignoring the ruling, which will free Antigua to punish the States. Since tariffs won't really work, Antigua could decide to ignore copyright treaties and allow companies to sell U.S. intellectual property -- from movies to music to bootleg copies of Windows Vista -- without giving anything to the creators. Antigua, it seems, already has its share of smarty-pants esquires.

Quick! Send more lawyers to D.C.! We've got a lawyer gap!

Photo: Harald Groven