>What kind of trouble can they cause that company? How does not having a lot of lawyers make it dangerous?

Big companies have virtually unlimited legal resources. Small companies don't -- lawyer time is very expensive for them. Anecdotally, it seems to cost around $5 million to mount a defense against a big public company in court.

BigCo's lawyers will file every type of complaint, motion, appeal, request, notice, stay and postponement possible in hopes of starving you out. You have to pay your lawyers for all the hours they spend just responding to frivolous and/or repetitious crap, which will end up being in the man-weeks before your first court date. You have to pay your lawyers to do all the pre-trial research, negotiation and strategizing, which costs will end up being in the man-months by the time you get to an actual court.

Once you finally do get to court, BigCo's $1000/hr law firm will mount very aggressive and convoluted legal arguments and attempt to mint new legal theories, because a) it greatly increases the complexity of the case, which means you're more likely to run out of money and concede to their client; b) their client doesn't care how much money the law firm is going to bill them, so the law firm is going to have a heyday and squeeze out every billable hour possible; and c) if the new legal theory actually works by some fluke of luck, both the firm and the attorneys directly involved in the case will get a big boost to their industry starpower. What does all this mean for the little guy that's being brought to court? It means your defense is going to cost you a lot of money.

There's also the possibility that the court will grant an injunction against your behavior while the issue pends, and if that affects the wrong thing, it's possible that your entire revenue stream will be destroyed and you'll either have to pivot on a moment's notice or just give up. Since these cases usually take years to see all the way through, you'll be out of business for quite a while, even if the court ultimately vindicates your position. Small companies can't afford to go without their revenue for years at a time.

For an example, refer to the case of Uzi Nissan, an IT technician who operated a computer repair business under his own name before Datsun rebranded to Nissan Motor. Nissan Motor drug him through an unsuccessful 9 year, $3 million saga to attempt to wrest the domain name from him. At the end of it, Nissan Motor was ordered to reimburse Mr. Nissan only $52k in legal fees, of the over $3 million Mr. Nissan was forced to spend, and Nissan Motor began pursuing a frivolous trademark filing so they could make a second attempt to steal the domain by use of legal force. [0]

Anyway, businesses can't be represented by an entrepreneur in court, they have to be represented by a member of the bar. If you can't afford to regularly refresh a 6-figure retainer as your lawyers fend off the vultures, you're basically SOL. You have to comply, or be sued. If you get sued and proceed without retaining good counsel, it's likely that you'll end up more FUBAR'd than you would've been if you had just complied with whatever the demand was in the first place. Compare Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., where the entrepreneur had issues keeping counsel on board and ended up being held personally liable for $3 million in damages.

As such, if any big corp is able to identify things they don't like before those things have begun to generate dozens of millions in annual revenues (enough to semi-comfortably fork over $500k-$1m/yr for legal defense), they can pretty successfully sue them out of existence. This happens regularly, you just don't hear about it that often.

[0] http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php