Corporate laws play an important role in business decision-making. Through business litigation strategies, businesses can create a safe and efficient working environment as well as a growth path. However, most of the successful organizations would have gone through high-stakes legal battles and commercial litigation while competing in the marketplace. Let’s look into the most intense corporate legal battles in history.

Ambani vs Ambani

There is an old joke on Dalal Street that the evolution of the Indian economy is symbolized by the transition from self-reliance to Reliance. This joke has realistic circumstances around it. The business built by Dhirubhai Ambani became the object of admiration for investors, and as its legend grew, it became an all-powerful entity with the power to transform governments and ministers. The rivalry between Dhirubhai's sons, Mukesh and Anil, over ownership made big news on the Dalal Street walls.

The conflict began shortly after Dhirubhai's death.  The two brothers used to communicate only by e-mail and letters. The dispute was over control of the Reliance Empire, and as Mukesh began asserting himself after September 2003, Anil began to feel that he was being sidelined. There was also speculation that Reliance Infocomm's expansion was at the expense of other group initiatives. For 13 months, Anil has not been given any role to play in Reliance, apart from Reliance Energy and Reliance Capital. Anil did not attend the group's most ambitious project, Reliance Infocom. This was because the official brochures listed Dhirubhai and Mukesh, not Anil. On July 27, 2004, RIL's board of directors voted to give Mukesh the authority to make all financial decisions.

In 2008, Anil even filed a Rs.10000 crore defamation suit against his brother, which was dropped later.

Tata Steel’s Kalinga Nagar Natural Resource Exploitation Issue

In 2006, one incident happened in Kalinga Nagar, Jaipur district, Orissa. The local tribes and other villagers had been waging a bitter struggle to avoid displacement by Tata Industries’ steel project, which has a long history of displacing residents and exploiting natural resources.  Construction was attempted to begin in Kalinga Nagar by Tata Industries, but it was stopped by the local people.  Villagers and the tribes gathered at the site of Tata Steel's proposed steel plant. But the innocent people were unaware of the conflict as soon as the bulldozers roared into action. Men and women armed with traditional weapons closed in on the site. However, the state secretariat gave strict instructions to facilitate the construction. Rubber bullets were fired, teargases were thrown and 12 adivasis were killed.

While the government tried hard to defuse the crisis, the people continued to block the road, leaving the 12 bodies on the highway. Late in the afternoon, with the persuasion of some social activists, they cremated the bodies. The deaths united the tribes, who vowed at the funeral home that they would not give up an inch of their ancestral lands for any industry.

The government had decided to offer thousands of acres of Adivasis land for the construction of mines, industries, and similar mega projects. If this plan comes to fruition, more than 55,000 Adivasis in Jharkhand alone will be forced off their land. In response to this threat, the villages formed the Bhumi Suraksha Sangatans and successfully organized “Janata Curfews” to keep government and mining company officials out of their villages. A new resistance movement was born.

Tata Motors Singur Land Case

In 2006, Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee announced that Tata Industries would be given about 1,000 acres of land to build a nano-manufacturing plant.  But the efforts to take control of the land in Singur, Hooghly district, failed because questions were raised as to whether the judgment had forced the acquisition of the 997 acres of multi-cropped land needed for the auto plant under the Colonial Land Acquisition Act of 1894.  According to this law, the state can acquire private land for public purposes, but not for the development of private enterprise. The illegality of this land acquisition has been substantially recognized by the Kolkata High Court.

After the government acquired the land, several protests against the state government took place as people lost their homes. However, landless farmers and peasants welcomed the factory. These people primarily own the bulk of the land, despite alleged discrimination in compensation.  The state authority put a one-month ban on operations under Section 144 of the Indian Penal Code, which was later extended indefinitely after the order was declared illegal by the Kolkata High Court. In 2016, the Supreme Court quashed the West Bengal government's acquisition of 997 acres of agricultural land from Tata Motors and ordered its return to 9,117 landowners. On October 30, 2023, Tata Motors won an arbitration award of Rs. 766, plus 11 percent interest, in the Singur plant case. 

Apple and Microsoft's Industry-Defining Legal Battle

People of the 1990s would have paid attention to the heated Mac vs. PC debate. It was one of the defining elements of computing in the 1990s. Although the controversy is now largely a thing of the past, there was undoubtedly genuine animosity between Apple and Microsoft, especially because of the events that led up to Apple's March 17, 1988 lawsuit against Microsoft for copyright infringement.

The suit was filed just months after Microsoft released Windows 2.0. According to Apple's top brass, this was because Microsoft copied the visual display on the Macintosh, and did so without authorization. Microsoft and its leader, Bill Gates, were the first outside developers to obtain a prototype of the Macintosh before its 1984 launch. The company planned to develop productivity software (word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) for the Macintosh.

Bill Gates instantly fell in love with the Mac OS, and after the Macintosh was released, he begged Apple to license the software to outside manufacturers so that the Macintosh would become the standard for personal computing.

 

There is much speculation about Bill Gates' motives for doing this, but Gates himself later stated that Microsoft's software profit margins on MacOS were much higher than those of IBM's licensed platform, MSDOS. For several reasons, Bill Gates' proposal was rejected by Jean-Louis Gasset, who was given control of the Macintosh and Lisa projects after Steve Jobs was ousted from them.  However, because of the close relationship between the companies they eventually reached an agreement, and Apple licensed Macintosh design elements to Microsoft for use in Windows.