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It was discovered Thursday that Samsung lawyer Susan Estrich represented the company in Apple v. Samsung despite not having the proper license to practice law in the suit’s jurisdiction of the Northern District of California, a mistake seen as yet another gaffe in the South Korean company’s case management.

Hint: It’s not one of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S smartphones.

The Apple v. Samsung trial continues to reveal juicy details about both companies, with the latest court filing breaking down just how much phones they sold over the past two years, AllThingsD reports.

The biggest surprise? Samsung’s most popular phone in America has been the Galaxy Prevail, a mid-level phone on prepaid provider Boost Mobile. Samsung sold 2.25 million units of the Galaxy Prevail, out of a total of 21.21 million phones sold between June 2010 and June 2012, the filing shows.

In second place for Samsung was the Epic 4G on Sprint, which sold 1.89 million units and was also its biggest revenue generator by bringing in $855 million. The company sold 4.1 million of its Galaxy S II models in total.

The Galaxy Prevail’s success shouldn’t be that surprising: It’s Samsung’s cheapest mid-range smartphone, and since it’s on the prepaid carrier Boost Mobile, it doesn’t come with the same hefty monthly fees as contracted smartphones. The Prevail may be unsexy, but it’s a damn good deal for consumers.

The same documents also bring up questions around Samsung’s reported table sales, Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt reports. While Samsung boasted that it sold more than 2 million Galaxy Tabs in early 2011, the filing shows that Samsung sold only 262,000 tablets in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2010 and 77,000 during the first quarter of 2011. Those numbers don’t include overseas sales, but even counting those Samsung’s numbers seem a bit inflated.

The filing unfortunately doesn’t break down Apple’s device sales beyond iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Apple sold 85 million iPhones during the period (worth $50 billion in revenue) and 34 million iPads ($19 billion in revenue). The iPod Touch is no slouch either, with 46 million units sold earning $1o.3 billion.

Check out the court filing below (via CNet):

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Samsung’s secret sales data, exposed in court filings, show that the company only sold 262,000 Galaxy Tab units in 2010, rather than the 2 million units it claimed to have.

A court document filed by Samsung on Thursday revealed the company’s smartphone and tablet sales numbers from June 2010 to June 2012, metrics that have been kept strictly confidential until now.

This week I was called to jury duty. The Honorable John Doran, Jr. presided. A jury selection is much like making a film or a commercial. There are a lot of stops, starts and waiting around while lawyers and judge side-bar conversations that you can’t hear but would so love to be invited to the party. Voir dire (questioning the jury panel to establish suitability) of the 50 member panel took over a day. Much like the beginning of a focus group, to help respondents develop a comfort level for future complex questions, the defense attorney asked what I thought was an interesting multiple choice question. How did we feel about our day in court? 1. Excited to be part of the process 2. Interested in the process 3. Anxious or apprehensive 4. Frustrated or perhaps a little resentful An ah ha moment. Each of these feelings could be held by people new to social media or even challenged with taking social media initiatives to the next level. The big realization .. we rarely stop to acknowledge and address these concerns before we plow into creating strategies and executing tactics. The results can be too many side-bar conversations that add time and dollars to our process. Several times Judge Duran offered explanations about the proceedings that brought context helping us not only understand the legal whys of the Court but the humanity of the judicial system. I suspect this was also his way of easing the boredom of the wait…

Apple should get down on its knees and thank God for whatever corporate traitor gave it Samsung’s internal iPhone vs Galaxy S1 comparison document.

I’m sure that you have seen some of the stories floating around about Samsung’s internal document detailing basically how the iPhone rocks and the Galaxy Samsung S1 sucks. I’ve read the entire document, and I’m almost literally speechless.

(I said almost.)

Let me offer a blinding flash of the obvious and mention I’m not a lawyer.

But I think it spells hellish legal agony for Samsung if the jury takes even a cursory glance at just a few pages. And an expert did tell VentureBeat just a few days ago that juries in “look and feel” patent cases will sometimes just simply eyeball the competing products to make a call.

Here’s your chance to play jury, without the hassles of showing up in court for $20 a day. I’ve included some screenshots below — okay, a lot of screenshots below — but they are all basically variations on one unchanging and massively damning theme:

GALAXY SUCKS, MAKE IT LIKE THE IPHONE.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m overreacting? Take a look for yourself:

I’ve managed products selling tens of millions in annual sales, and I have been in product development meetings where we’ve been late to market on an innovation and needed to catch up. And we did exactly what Samsung did: Study the market leaders, identify their strengths, and remedy our weaknesses.

But two things were different.

First, no product is perfect. And that includes the iPhone (anyone who wants a quick way to turn battery-sucking Bluetooth on or off on a non-jailbroken iPhone knows this). So in any product comparison, teams I participated in always found a few places even in the best products that were suspect or weak where we could take advantage.

Second, even very good is not the best. The iPhone is very, very good … but it could use some improvement. Apple does so with every iOS release. And the job of a competitor is to stand on the shoulders of whatever giants it can find … and move the sticks forward. To make progress.

In this document at least, Samsung makes zero attempt to do either. Page after page says: Do it the way iPhone does it.

And that kinda plays right into Apple’s point about “slavish” copying.

Image credit: Complot/ShutterStock

Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat

Oh, this is going to get juicy real quick.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup is demanding the names of any writers who have a paid relationship with Oracle or Google.

The demand came today in the ongoing lawsuit between the two companies in their dispute over the Android OS.

Alsup wrote he is concerned that the parties and/or their lawyers may have hired or paid journalists, commentators or bloggers who then commented on the case. The order was filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

Alsup writes:

“Although proceedings in this matter are almost over, they are not fully over yet and, in any event, the disclosure required by this order would be of use on appeal or on any remand to make clear whether any treatise, article, commentary or analysis on the issues posed by this case are possibly influenced by financial relationships.”

Oracle and Google must turn over the names by August 17.

The controversy is enveloping Florian Mueller, one of the more incendiary bloggers on the topic of open source and patent law. Mueller has been covering the trial. He recently stated that Oracle is paying him as a consultant. His posts, surprise, have been very much in favor of Oracle’s arguments.

Mueller had this exchange today with well-known court reporter Ginny LaRoe:

The Oracle-Google trial has been a contentious one.Thankfully, though, Oracle lost to Google in its fight to copyright APIs.

Soon we will see who really does write for these two giants. My bet: the Oracle list will be far longer than the one Google presents to the court. And I expect we will see names of analysts among those on the payroll – especially from the larger firms.

New Apple v. Samsung court documents, presented by Apple on Monday as part of the ongoing Apple v. Samsung trial, allegedly show Samsung’s proprietary home-screen icon designs are nearly identical to that of the iPhone’s.

Like the best, most selfless kind of librarian, the Google Books Library Project aims to make it easier for people to find books.

But according to a new court filing by the Authors Guild, Google’s efforts weren’t aimed at improving libraries at all: The company wanted to hurt Amazon.

“We want web searchers interested in book content to come to Google, not Amazon,” the filing quotes Google as saying in a 2003 presentation.

Locked in a court battle with Google since 2005, the Authors Guild argues that Google’s Library Project was, from the outset, meant to be a commercial effort. This makes it harder for Google to maintain that the endeavor was meant solely to help scholars and improve libraries. It also makes it easier for the Authors Guild to justify snatching $750 per infringing book from Google.

Google is toeing the line in its response to the claims. “We believe Google Books constitutes fair use by allowing users to identify interesting books and find ways to borrow or buy those books, much like a card catalog for the digital age,” a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat.

According to the Authors Guild filing, Google has invested over $180 million in the Google Books Library Project so far. The company has scanned 20 million titles, nearly half of which are still under copyright.

Filed under: media

In an effort to prove a willful infringement on its design patents, Apple on Friday presented internal Samsung documents in court containing side-by-side comparisons of the iPhone and what would eventually become the Galaxy S smartphone.