Microsoft Says It Won't Pay Legal Fees, Hand Over Documents To Mass., W. Va.

The software giant Monday filed its opposition to a petition by the states of Massachusetts and West Virginia requesting reimbursement for attorney's fees of more than $2.3 million. The company also rebuffed those states' requests to produce legal documents including all time records for Microsoft's attorneys during the past six years of litigation and all documents related to the payment of fees to the other states.

Microsoft was required to pay the fees of the states that agreed to the antitrust settlement arrived between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice last year.

In today's filing, however, Microsoft attorneys said they won't fork out the cash for Massachusetts and West Virginia, the two remaining states that filed their opposition to the antitrust settlement last December. Originally, nine states led by Iowa and Connecticut appealed the antitrust settlement but dropped that opposition when U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly approved the antitrust settlement signed in late 2001.

Microsoft believes "the [two] states should receive no fees at all or, at a minimum, a substantially reduced fee aware," according to documents filed March 31 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "The states failed to substantially prevail on their legal claims, failed to keep contemporaneous time records, failed to exercise billing judgment and engaged in improper billing of weeks at a time."

Microsoft also requested from the court a protective order denying those states access to Microsoft attorneys' time records and billable hours.