Nesson may be a brilliant Harvard law professor, but it appears that he’s a piss-poor lawyer. Keep this in mind if you ever consider hiring a law professor to represent you in a case.
That was the backdrop, but when Nesson and his team stepped up to litigate the issue of fair use, what did they offer to Gertner? "A truly chaotic defense," she calls it, along with legal papers that "can only be described as perfunctory."
It was also one that reached much too far. "Rather than tailoring his fair use defense to suggest a modest exception to copyright protections, Tenenbaum mounted a broadside attack that would excuse all file-sharing for private enjoyment." By striking so broadly at the idea of copyright, Tenenbaum took the matter out of Gertner's hands. "Whether the widespread, unlimited file sharing that the record suggests he engaged in benefits the public more than our current copyright protections is a balance to be struck by Congress, not this Court," she concluded.
In addition, she singled out Nesson for criticism in a footnote to the memo. "Defense counsel repeatedly missed deadlines, ignored rules, engaged in litigation over conduct that was plainly illegal (namely, the right to tape counsel and the Court without consent), and even went so far as to post the illegal recordings to the Web." Examples of Nesson's bad behavior in the case "are legion."
Source: How Team Tenenbaum missed a chance to shape P2P fair use law