PeopleSoft Lawyer’s Weblog Is Fresh Twist in Spin Wars

In this complex world, demanding as it does constant elucidation by experts, the phenomenon of spin has become inescapable.

After every day of a celebrity trial, every candidates’ debate, every high-profile Washington hearing, the advocates for one side or another provide reporters with a construed-to-order version of the event. These views sometimes force pure facts clear out of the next day’s newspapers.

It’s hard to think of a richer example of the art of spin than one growing out of the antitrust trial of Redwood City, Calif.-based Oracle Corp., now unfolding before a San Francisco federal judge. In the case, the Justice Department is suing to block Oracle’s $7.7-billion hostile takeover of Pleasanton, Calif.-based PeopleSoft Inc., with which it competes to sell fiendishly complex business software.

Given the abstruse nature of the case, it’s not a shock to find Oracle’s counsel, Dan Wall, and the government’s attorneys giving reporters impromptu hallway clinics every day after court.

But the most interesting salvo in the spin wars is being fired via a weblog from one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent lawyers, Gary Reback.

Reback doesn’t profess to be unbiased. Renowned as the lawyer who prodded the government to bring its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft Corp. a few years ago, he now serves as PeopleSoft’s outside attorney, and his blog appears on its corporate website.

Yet as a confluence of modern information management and modern technology, his effort deserves to be recognized as something quite groundbreaking. Commentaries by law professors on hot courthouse topics already make up a sizable subset of the blog world, but I’m not aware of any law blogs devoted to a single trial.

The case itself involves the market for corporate software, which integrates programs for numerous functions such as purchasing and human resources. Only three companies are capable of selling such systems to huge global corporations: Oracle, PeopleSoft and the German company SAP.

The government argues that the reduction of three vendors to two will inevitably mean higher prices. It also contends that the takeover is anti-competitive because Oracle and PeopleSoft are direct rivals in several markets. Among the government’s witnesses are customers who’ve extracted huge discounts from the companies by playing them off each other.

Oracle, meanwhile, asserts that the merger won’t affect competition because firms such as Microsoft will soon jump into the business.

Reback says he started posting his blog a few days after the trial began, when PeopleSoft expressed concern that employees and customers reading newspaper accounts weren’t hearing its point of view on the evidence. Reback himself was already frustrated at the press’ natural tendency to treat the proceedings more as theater than as a reasoned clash of legal argument and proof.

When Oracle’s Wall disclosed in his opening statement that Microsoft once had held merger discussions with SAP, for instance, the next day’s trial coverage invariably focused on that mini-bombshell (the discussions had gone nowhere), rather than on the meat of Oracle’s defense. Reback seems to regret having missed the chance to remind reporters that the Microsoft angle was only a sideshow.

What with PeopleSoft’s intense interest in evading Oracle’s clutch, it’s unsurprising that Reback’s blog tends to portray the government’s case as a well-reasoned brief almost faultlessly presented, and Oracle’s as a courthouse snow job.

His view is that Oracle’s defense probably impresses the judge less than the susceptible laypeople in the audience. As he wrote after the trial’s first week: “While the DOJ has had the upper hand in court, Oracle has clearly scored most of the points with the press.”

Indeed, anyone relying exclusively on his blog for a sense of the trial must be wondering why Oracle hasn’t simply surrendered. Wall, pressed to give his opinion of Reback’s blog, remarked to my colleague Joseph Menn: “I think it’s like getting your news from Pravda.”

Then again, Reback’s blog delivers more sophisticated legal analysis and a more complete survey of the testimony than one is likely to find in the general press.

Sometimes, he’s edgier too. After the government played a video deposition in which a co-president of Oracle, Charles E. Phillips, defended his description of Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP as an “oligopoly” by saying he had used the term colloquially, Reback pounced. “Huh?” he wrote. “Just how does one use ‘oligopoly’ colloquially? ‘Hey, baby, let’s go back to my place and oligopoly?’ ”

Whether this effort presages a proliferation of Web commentaries on big trials is anyone’s guess. Reback has intimate knowledge of the case -- his PeopleSoft duties include overseeing the trial preparation of witnesses from the PeopleSoft ranks -- but because his client isn’t actually a party to the lawsuit (merely the beneficiary of the government’s action), he has a freer hand to comment on the proceedings than if he had to answer to the judge. Finding similarly well-placed bloggers for other high-profile cases won’t be so easy.

On the other hand, the opportunity to shape the public’s understanding of a complex business trial may be hard to pass up in the future. Reback notes that in the Microsoft trial, the public’s poor grasp of the legal issues may have allowed the federal government to close the case with what many consider a wrist-slapping settlement with the big software company.

“Had we known to do this during the Microsoft trial, might that have been a good idea?” he asks. “That’s an interesting question. We’re in new territory.”

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com.