It's amazing that no matter how much you pay lawyers, they can be this incompetent.
First they somehow never managed to get the patent review process going that Google proved could wipe out bogus trivial patents. Then Samsung's legal team missed deadlines to produce their prior art research. Then they stuffed the arguments about tablet computer trade dress into the largest part of their time and won that but failed to save time to make a case about smart phones.
And most importantly, they let an obviously biased holder of silly patents who feels great pride in them get on the jury and lead it straight to this conclusion as foreman. Did they sleep through voir dire?
Did the Samsung lawyers deliberately throw the case for some reason? Maybe the Korean corporate culture rubbed them the wrong way and they simply couldn't communicate effectively or they were hit with an epidemic of contagious chronic fatigue or something.
I believe they used this trial to buy some time. They have many grounds to file an appeal now (think of the evidence they introduced too late, which was rejected). Until then, the verdict will not be final. Meanwhile, their old products which infringe can be phased out of the market without much cost. The newer products have their own style (Galaxy S III for example).
The biggest danger they face now is the potential blocking of their most profitable products from the US market. But they likely can fix this all in software in the time until this ban can come into effect.
In US courts, you can't ordinarily introduce new evidence on appeal. You can argue that the trial court made errors in applying the law, but if those errors involved excluding evidence, the most you can expect out of that is another trial. (And even that's pretty rare; if they were counting on being able to do that, it's a hell of a gamble.)
In my experience, this is fairly standard for lawyers. Sometimes they are all too human. The problem is the consequences of their occasional (YMMV) incompetence can be so huge and far-reaching, as with this case.
It looks like they felt the most damning evidence were emails where Samsung was told to back off from copying Apple but did not heed their partners advice.
First they somehow never managed to get the patent review process going that Google proved could wipe out bogus trivial patents. Then Samsung's legal team missed deadlines to produce their prior art research. Then they stuffed the arguments about tablet computer trade dress into the largest part of their time and won that but failed to save time to make a case about smart phones.
And most importantly, they let an obviously biased holder of silly patents who feels great pride in them get on the jury and lead it straight to this conclusion as foreman. Did they sleep through voir dire?
Did the Samsung lawyers deliberately throw the case for some reason? Maybe the Korean corporate culture rubbed them the wrong way and they simply couldn't communicate effectively or they were hit with an epidemic of contagious chronic fatigue or something.