Arista Networks’ stock took it on the chin when Cisco slapped the company with patent infringement and copyright law suits last Friday, losing almost 20% of its value at one point as investors and others mulled the long term implications of the suits.

The short answer: this is going to take a long time and could get pretty ugly for Arista.

One of the suits accuses Arista of violating 14 Cisco patents, while the second is for extensive copying of Cisco’s user manuals and multi-word CLI commands (see Cisco slaps Arista Networks with patent, copyright infringement suits).

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