Bill Gates will be giving me a few bucks towards the purchase of my next hard drive, thanks to the recent settlement in the class-action suit brought by Minnesota against Microsoft. Yay for me, but the best aspects of the settlement are the millions of dollars that will go to public schools and the Minneapolis Legal Aid Society. I did some summer clerking for the Disability Law Center, part of the Legal Aid Society, and I can attest to the fact that they could definitely use some new computers. Microsoft seems to be determined to resolve all of the outstanding litigation against it, which is probably a smart strategy. The hundreds of millions in settlement dollars is probably preferable to the potential billions in compensatory and punitive damages. And when I read about the millions of dollars that are going to the firms that worked on the case, I momentarily regretted my decision not to go into private practice. But only for a moment.
