The Brightwork Research SAP Expert Witness Lawsuit Support

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • We are the only research entity that provides SAP expert witness services.
  • We provide the most knowledgeable SAP expert witness support.

About Our Research Focus

  • We are both a research entity that focuses on SAP and is a provider of expert witness service

Our SAP Expert Witness Lawsuit Support

  • We combine both SAP implementation experience, one of the largest research databases on SAP, along with the experience supporting attorneys in areas ranging from intellectual property to implementation cases to support our SAP expert witness offering.
  • Because of our in-depth research ability, we can support attorneys with research directed around the specific case. For example one fertile area we research is case studies for how SAP uses indirect access to customers.
  • We offer everything from verification of exploratory research to supporting lengthy full-time cases.

A: Our General SAP Legal Coverage

Here are just a few examples of our SAP expert witness coverage.

#A1: SAP HANA (SAP’s database)

  • Shaun Snapp broke the story of the issues with SAP HANA versus other vendors both with respect to technical limitations and how HANA was being used to block out vendors before the Teradata v. SAP lawsuit was filed. The Teradata v. SAP lawsuit deals with SAP’s HANA database. 
  • Significant portions of the original complaint filed by Teradata appear to rely upon articles at the Brightwork Research & Analysis website. 
  • Shaun Snapp has continued to cover the Teradata case along with several contacts that have also taken an interest in the lawsuit. This has meant reviewing court documents for interesting storylines, a few of which have been published at Brightwork Research & Analysis.  

#B2: SAP Indirect Access

  • SAP’s indirect access policy has been the source of several lawsuits, including very prominently SAP v. Diageo. 
  • Shaun Snapp was the first individual covering the SAP space to identify SAP’s indirect access program as a violation of the tying arrangement clause of US antitrust law (that is essentially similar to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer/Windows tying policy). This is explained in the article How to Understand SAP’s Indirect Access and Anti Trust Law. 
  • One software vendor later hired a Duke University law professor who wrote a paper that came to the same conclusion regarding the violation of the tying arrangement violation. 

B: Examples of Our SAP Expert Witness Lawsuit Support

#A1: Support for an SAP IP Lawsuit

Shaun Snapp supported a law firm that was defending SAP against a lawsuit for violation of this firm’s IP. Shaun Snapp knew the history of the application category. He was primarily provided technical expertise as to whether the product that SAP developed was based upon the application that the company that was bringing the lawsuit claimed. The lawyers involved were all intellectual property attorneys and did not work with software for a living. Therefore some of the time that Shaun Snapp billed to the law firm was spent educating attorneys on technical aspects around the software, as it related to the claims by the plaintiff. 

#B2: Support for an SAP Lawsuit Against a Systems Integrator

An SAP customer brought this lawsuit against the systems integrator. 

The SAP customer stated the following among other items in the complaint. 

  • That the systems integrator was incompetent and hid important items from the SAP customer.
  • That the systems integrator did not bring the right resources to the project. 
  • That after go-live, the SAP customer experienced disruptions in their operations because of the poorly managed implementation. 

The attorneys for the firm defending the implementing firm were interested in the following analysis. 

  1. Estimating the liability of the firm based upon analyzing the implementation documentation, emails, and the explanations of what had occurred on the project. 
  2. As the implementation’s failure was in some part due to one of the SAP applications (of the several that were implemented), one of the questions was how reasonable the response by the implementation firm was to the problematic application. Shaun Snapp was able to provide insights as to why so many problems occurred and evaluate the client’s response to these problems. This came by analyzing the email exchanges between the client and the plaintiff and reviewing the technical issue. 
  3. There were also multiple issues across different SAP applications. The implementing firm had a problem closing these issues. And this led to a number of adjustments on the project. The client’s attorneys wanted an evaluation of these issues and how the implementing company performed and if they were reasonable and customary for a typical SAP project. 
  4. The attorneys for the client required that Shaun Snapp understand the full complaint and know what to look for in the documents, emails, etc.. that were part of the discovery. 

This was a large and prominently showcased lawsuit in IT media.