Judge Orders ConnectU To Pay Former Lawyers $13 Million In Facebook Case

According to a recent

by TechCrunch, a judge has ordered the creators of ConnectU to pay Quinn Emmanuel, the firm that represented them in the Facebook case, $13 million. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss and Divya Narendra are the three who co-founded HarvardConnection, which was later renamed ConnectU. The three ultimately took Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to court, alleging that he had copied their idea and illegally used source code intended for the site he was hired to create. TechCrunch reports that the lawsuit against Facebook was filed in 2004, and a settlement agreement for both cases was reached in February, 2008, valued at $65 million. In May 2010, it was reported that ConnectU was accusing Facebook of securities fraud on the value of the stock that was part of the settlement, alleging the stock was worth $11 million instead of $45 million that the social networking giant had proclaimed. One of ConnectU's law firms, Quinn Emanuel, didn't want to wait for their part of the settlement deal, 20% of the settlement fee or $13 million, as part of a contingency agreement. ConnectU subsequently fired Quinn Emanuel and sued the firm for malpractice by failing to obtain recent valuations of Facebook's common stock before negotiating the settlement On August 25, 2010, an arbitration panel ruled that Quinn Emanuel “earned its full contingency fee” and found that the firm had committed no malpractice.