The shenanigans which saw the ousting of HP's CEO are still rumbling on, with repercussions for the lawyers who gave her some very odd advice.
Pretending to be someone else in order to get private records is obviously illegal to you and me, but two lawyers who advised differently are now facing repercussions.
Larry Sonsini, a founder of Silicon Valley’s most famous law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, told the HP board that this practice was legal.
Sonsini has now apparently been told that his company’s position as outside counsel to the HP board is over.
Sonsini, at the time he made his judgment, had concurred with an in-house HP lawyer who is now facing criminal charges.
The two lawyers had given the ugly practice of impersonating someone else to obtain their confidential records the anodyne description ‘pre-texting’ which sounds a lot better than obtaining something by false pretences.
Apparently the internal HP lawyer had formed his view on the legality of pre-texting with a third lawyer who shared an office with a private investigator working for HP.
It seems a very odd decision but lawyers can make worse ones. For instance by Lord Goldsmith, the UK Attorney General, who declared the Iraq war legal, at the very last moment.
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