Ceglia v. Zuckerberg returns, with a bang - biglaw representation, lots of email

Surely it is about the money, but the link above suggests that litigation against Facebook will only marginally enhance the partner's reputation. What I am driving at is the idea that mere involvement in a high-profile action is insufficient benefit to justify the reputational risk, unless there is a better-than-even chance of success. I don't see how a senior partner at DLA Piper would want to jeopardize their good name if there were any risk of a court dismissing the suit as frivolous.

I am consistently unsatisfied by journalists' translations of court cases. I just read the entire recent Winklevoss decision yesterday because not a single journalist, across the dozens of articles I checked, did any exposition of the supposed "SEC violation".

During the recent Wisconsin union legislation fiasco, it took me 15 minutes to even find the name of the bill that was passed. Not a single journalist thought it fitting to include it. I eventually found it on a union web site, and then was able to read the text of the bill myself.

The vast majority of journalists are less than useless with respect to both law and science. 99% of them don't even read the original sources, they just copy some other journalist and add their own "research" which usually amounts to a Google search they did about other completely unrelated dirt on the parties involved.

You'd think organizations like WSJ or NYT would be better, but in my experience they're absolutely not.

Well, if it's so prestigious, let's just award Ceglia the shares now! Oh, but wait. Facebook's legal team is prestigious too, and is advancing the idea Ceglia's evidence is phony. Do we simply award the victory to the more prestigious team?

Even top lawyers can be duped by their earnest-seeming clients and plausible-looking fabrications.

Especially if Ceglia did engage in some real email with Zuckerberg (that said something else), it would be possible for him to create plausible-looking email records with alternate text.

Right now I think it's too early to judge whether that's likely or unlikely. The whole process will ultimately determine the relative credibility of the evidence and testimony.

This is obviously a "troll" case that is getting undue attention and credibility by DLA Piper's representation. To prevent these type of cases in the future, we, as entrepreneurs, should not give business to DLA Piper and other firms that take on cases like this to make the point that this is not ok.

That DLA Piper has taken on the case doesn't mean that the claim is credible. It only means that they deemed the case credible enough that Facebook likely will try to kill the case with a big settlement and DLA Piper will get a large chunk of that because they probably represent Ceglia on contingency basis.

The bigger problem is that by taking on the case, DLA Piper has made the claim appear more credible not only because of their skillful lawyering, but also because of their reputation. But the fact still remains that this is a "troll" case. Zuckerberg built Facebook and implemented his idea to make it big, and it's rather unfortunate if the outdated "general partnership" business structure could be applied to an internet company in this way.

It appears that while DLA Piper can use its reputation to make the case more credible, the fact that the firm took on a "troll" case doesn't affect its reputation, though it should. When a small law firm that is struggling for its survival takes on questionable cases that is one thing, but DLA Piper has a choice even in a bad economy.