Perhaps it was a case of getting even with Sanford Bernstein - which (among many others) - has aired some fairly harsh comments about Lehman Brothers and its dubious state of health in the past couple of months. Or perhaps it was a case, like so many plagiarists claim, of genuine memory confusion (”I must have read it somewhere and it stayed in my mind”).
Anyway, the striking mea culpa from Lehman, in the form of an apology letter sent to clients last week for copying parts of Bernstein research in a seniconductor industry report, is a rare specimen on Wall Street, where most of the intellectual property disputes focus on financial innovations.
So here, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, are excerpts from the letter:
Excerpts of an August 21 letter that Lehman Brothers sent to clients:
Dear Client,
On March 3, 2008, we released a semiconductor industry report entitled Semiconductors-Virtualization: Investigating the Impact… It has recently come to our attention that a section of the report, specifically a virtualization workload forecast (analysis and figures found on pages 35 to 39 of our report)… and two additional figures, figure 19 on page 23 and figure 26 found on page 30, closely resemble content produced by Bernstein research last summer in two research reports… The material was not sourced to Bernstein and was used without the firm’s permission. We sincerely apologize to Bernstein, the authors of the reports, and to our clients for this incident…
Sincerely,
Lehman Brothers
