Technology & Marketing Law Blog …..
The judge already expressed strong condemnation by calling the plaintiff lawyers’ billable hour computations “flagrant overcharging,” but he didn’t stop there:
To be fair, lawyers routinely “distort reality” in their judicial filings. That’s literally what they are paid to do. But apparently these lawyers pushed their reality distortion too far for this judge.
This is a rare example of a judge using an emoji to express part of the opinion’s narrative, rather than referring to emojis contained in the litigants’ evidence. I hesitate to declare this the first time a U.S. judge has used an emoji to articulate their legal conclusion, but I can’t think of another example. The closest I can think of is when the 9th Circuit displayed the thumbs-up and heart emojis, instead of characterizing them textually, to refer to social media reactions. See Garnier v. O’Connor-Ratcliff. That was a pure word substitution. Here, the judge went further and actually integrated an emoji in his judicial “analysis.” That may have broken some new judicial ground.
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