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李開復博士英文自傳全書（連載【94】）

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The dream team included three Google lawyers headed by David Drummond. The second one was Google’s deputy general counsel Nicole Wong, a Chinese American, who is always calm and logical. The third was a bright young Korean American attorney, Michael Kwun, who was in charge of all the lawsuit’s details.

Three other lawyers were top lawyers from the famous legal firm Keker & Van Ness.  These three were headed by John Keker, who had handled numerous high profile lawsuit including former President Reagon’s Iran Contra case and the famous investment banker Frank Quattrone’s lawsuit. From John’s team was a technology law expert of Indian descent, Ragesh Tangri, who knows enough about computers to work as a manager for a high tech company. There was also Susan Harriman, who is soft spoken but can turn into another person during cross examination. When she role-played cross examining with me, her relentless questioning made me feel as intimidated as facing a real Microsoft lawyer!

Finally, Brad Keller was my personal lawyer. Brad has a mellow and likable charisma that many could mistake him for a gentleman from a southern plantation.

The dream team boosted my confidence in the lawsuit. We worked together for six weeks, during which our first task was “discovery.” We asked Microsoft for the emails I had written and received at work, as well as other Microsoft-internal documents, to be used as evidence. 

Microsoft was legally obligated to provide those emails, so they did. But we received a lot more than we requested. They also gave us my former colleagues’ messages related to my Microsoft emails. The total exceeded 300,000!

The 300,000 emails were in PDF files on 20 CDs. These files had no text but only pictures of the emails, as though they were photographs. That meant we couldn’t use key words to search passages.

“Are we going to read these emails one by one?” My lawyers expressed their overwhelmed feelings.

Obviously Microsoft wanted to make it difficult for us. However, they forgot that I was a speech recognition expert. I calmly told my lawyers, “Don’t worry. I’ll solve the problem.”

I helped my lawyers find an OCR (optical character recognition) program which converted the pictures into text. Then, we loaded all the documents into Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the OCR tended to misread words once in a while. As a result, year 2004 often became year 7004, year 2005 was mixed up with 2006, and “Ballmer” usually turned into “Balder”. The Word documents that came out of the scanning process were full of such mistakes.

The mistakes slowed us down at first. But I soon came up with a simple solution – since the confusions were consistent and not frequent, to overcome the confusion between 2005 and 2006, we could simply search for both numbers when looking for my 2005 emails. This way we wouldn’t miss any important evidence.

While reading our search results, I was shocked to see an email from a former colleague at Microsoft Research China to a headquarters vice president. The email essentially said, “Congratulations! Your plan was brilliant. Chinese people value loyalty, and our PR team has successfully stigmatized Kai-Fu as a disloyal person.”

I also found myself betrayed by a manager I had mentored at Microsoft Research China for years. He said in an email to the headquarters, “We hope to get more resources from you in order for us to beat the founder of Microsoft Research Asia in China. Imagine what a big win that would be!”

I thought these two people were my friends! I would never expect them to risk their jobs by standing up for me against their employer. But how could they act happily to help Microsoft attack me despite all I had done for them?

My heart ached. But there was no time for sadness. I had to put my emotions aside! I took a deep breath and then continued to look for evidence with my lawyers.

We found the evidence we needed. One email written by an employee of MSN Search said, “Though Kai-Fu Lee had nothing to do with our projects, we have to say he worked with us for the sake of the lawsuit. We’ll frame him that way.”

We also went through Gates’ calendar as well as mine and proved the “four to five” search meetings claimed by Microsoft were fabricated.

We found these, and many other valuable pieces of evidence. My lawyers were very happy. One of them said, “Hey, Kai-Fu, if you ever want to change jobs again, you can work for us! You are as good as two people.”

“Really?” I asked, making an expression of being flattered. “Am I really as good as two lawyers?”

He shrugged, “I meant two IT people.”

In addition to collecting evidence, my lawyers suggested trying to get some fair news stories on the case so the judge wouldn’t find all the articles pro-Microsoft when reading the newspaper in the morning. Particularly, it would be valuable to show that Google wanted to hire me for my inherent abilities, rather than what I learned from or did at Microsoft.  This was another challenge. Since I wasn’t supposed to do interviews, I needed to find someone objective and committed to not quoting me.

I recalled a young reporter I had met in China, Kristi Heim, who had worked in China and once followed me to a Chinese university to cover my speech there. With her excellent command of the Chinese language, she understood what I had done for Chinese college students. More significantly, she happened to work at the Seattle Times, the newspaper the judge probably would read every morning.

Would she write a fair report from an objective point of view? When I reached her by phone, she said, “Kai-Fu, I know you are a decent person. But as a news reporter, I have to investigate the case and let both sides voice their opinions.”

In August 2005, an article titled, “Microsoft and Google Feud over Top Exec” appeared in the Seattle Times. The article describes me as “a kind of spiritual leader to aspiring Chinese technologists.”

It quotes a Beijing University graduate named Gao Jian, “Kai-Fu Lee is a kind of idol among universities. Students in universities just want to choose a name and go where he is. Bill Gates and Kai-Fu Lee are both a kind of hero in the business, but Kai-Fu Lee has more contact with the students. And he is a Chinese. I think this is an important reason."

The article also analyzes the lawsuit and states, “But the real struggle may have less to do with Lee's technical expertise and more to do with his ability to influence a generation of young technologists, especially in China.”

I hoped the judge would read this article and see the lawsuit in a different light.

Following the Seattle Times article, other media began to tell the Google side of the story. Google repeatedly announced that the company didn’t need any of Microsoft’s technologies and thus hired me not for technical know-how, but for my management abilities and my influence in China. Google also pointed to my record of never leaking business secrets in past job changes to prove my honesty and integrity.

While some accurate news and balanced reports made me feel better, my nerves were still all wound up, unable to relax. I felt as if skating on thin ice. Any minute I could fall through the ice and drown in deadly cold water. Every step was a risk to take.

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