If you’re asking what Apple can do, a lot.

In civil litigation, one of the big steps is discovery, where each party is trying to gather information that they want to use. That can take several months or longer, especially when the two parties disagree on what information ought to be shared.

During discovery, and at other times, each party will file motions asking for certain things, certain rules to be imposed, for example. And then the other party will file a response motion. And then maybe the judge will schedule oral arguments, or maybe they won’t, and the judge will make a ruling. Because the deadlines are usually on the orders of months, and at the very least weeks, it’s easy for the process to get drawn out.

And the judge is typically working other cases. So even if they get some documents on Monday, they might not be able to schedule a meeting until 3 weeks from now, for example. But even if they could rush, there’s typically not a huge necessity to do so. In this situation, the judge could impose massive financial sanctions on Apple for past conduct, should they choose to do so. In the end, this is all about money and because of that it can be resolved by making one party pay the other a lot of money. So delaying is a tactic but it doesn’t necessarily save you money in the end, not if you lose, because the duration of the bad behavior is longer and therefore you owe more.