Dell’s Own Law Firm Had Trouble with the Computers, Lawsuit Reveals
The law firm defending Dell in a lawsuit claiming faulty equipment was itself complaining about the company’s computers, according to documents recently released in the litigation.
Dell had “balked at fixing 1,000 suspect computers” at the law firm, Alston & Bird, the New York Times reports, citing e-mail uncovered in the three-year-old lawsuit.
The article also cites an e-mail exchange between Dell customer support employees after a complaint from another law firm, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. A Dell worker’s e-mail suggests that the company’s employees were aware of faulty motherboards, the story says. “We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning,” the e-mail reads.
According to the story, the documents suggest Dell sold at least 11.8 million OptiPlex desktop computers to business and government customers between 2003 and 2005 that were at risk of failing. The troubled computers, the Times says, were “riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions.” The problems stemmed from bad capacitors, found on motherboards, that were produced by Asian component suppliers. The bad capacitors affected computers made by other companies as well.
The suit, filed by an Internet service company called Advanced Internet Technologies, has not yet gone to trial. Dell lawyers deny AIT’s claims and say the company has misinterpreted documents in the case. The company has taken a $300 million charge against earnings partly to fix and replace troubled computers, and has extended warranties on the computers and often replaced them in response to complaints, the Times says.
