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Frustrated judge orders Apple, Samsung counsel to meet today

Judge Koh says she is "disappointed" in final jury-instruction discussions and orders attorneys to meet face to face.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Apple and Samsung are battling over the look and feel of their devices, as well as what the jury is told.

The federal judge presiding over the Apple-Samsung patent infringement trial has apparently grown weary of the quibbling attorneys in the case and has ordered them to meet in person today to hammer out joint jury instructions.

"The Court is disappointed by the parties' respective reports regarding their meet and confer efforts on final jury instructions," U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh said in her order today, according to the Foss Patents blog. "Lead trial counsel shall meet and confer in person today and file joint and disputed final jury instructions by Monday, August 13, 2012 at 8 a.m."

The order comes after the two companies reportedly accused each other of impeding the jury instruction process. Foss reports that an Apple filing late Friday claimed that "although [it] has tried diligently to advance the process, Samsung has stymied those efforts." Samsung reportedly responded by saying it had "agreed to more than twenty revised instructions proposed by Apple and is continuing to review Apple's remaining disputed instructions for any common ground," while Apple had "agreed to only two complete instructions drafted solely by Samsung."

CNET has contacted Apple and Samsung for comment and will update this report when we learn more.

Their disagreement over what the jury should be told when the companies rest their cases is just the latest courtroom row in the high-stakes trial. The two tech giants butted heads over destroyed evidence and whether the jury would hear disparaging comments the late Steve Jobs made about Android, the mobile operating system that powers Samsung devices. (Koh ultimately ruled that the jury would not hear the comments.)

Apple went so far as to ask the court to keep jurors from seeing the Samsung logo on video equipment in the court to avoid the impression among jurors that Samsung equipment and the company itself are somehow favored by the court.