Indicted! – 4 signs your lawsuit is heading for swift, sure destruction –

Updated: Earlier this year I posted about the signs your lawsuit is spinning toward calamity. I used Paul Ceglia, the guy suing Facebook, as an example. Well, things appear to have bottomend out for Mr. Ceglia —

U.S. Attorney Arrests Paul Ceglia for Multibillion-Dollar Scheme to Defraud Facebook
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Paul Ceglia seems like a fairly ordinary guy from Western New York. Until you realize he claims to own half of FACEBOOK! In his 2010 lawsuit, Ceglia claimed that a 2003 contract he and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg signed entitled Ceglia to 50% of Facebook, which launched the following year. However, after enduring a series of body blows from Facebook’s attorneys, Motions to Dismiss filed recently by Facebook make four allegations that could be the end of the lawsuit:

1.Altering the key piece of evidence. Facebook said its forensics experts found evidence that the ink on the contract was less than two years old and that the document had been “baked” in the sun to artificially age it.

2.Adding words to the contract that weren’t there. doctoring the original “work-for-hire” contract to insert Facebook references and making up a series of e-mail exchanges between Ceglia and Zuckerberg to try to bolster the claim.

3.No mention of Facebook in emails. “Verifiably genuine e-mails” between Zuckerberg and Ceglia from Zuckerberg’s old Harvard account contained no mention of Facebook.

4. Doctoring the computer’s system clock. The experts also said that Ceglia had reset the system clock on his computer to 2003 and 2004 to make it appear the emails he submitted had been created at that time, and that Ceglia had used and apparently destroyed external storage devices during the course of the lawsuit which he never turned over to Facebook.

Mr. Ceglia will likely soon have much greater problems than deciding how to invest his 50% share of Facebook. Problems like the dismissal of his lawsuit, the threat of sanctions from the court and potential criminal charges.

If you see any of these signs in your lawsuit, be certain that trouble is ahead!

Posted by Shawn Roberts

On this blog, I write about and try to answer practical Oklahoma legal questions. My focus and most experience is in estate planning and business issues including Oklahoma non-compete law. I make a living as an attorney in the law firm I founded, Shawn J. Roberts, P.C. in Oklahoma City. I live in Edmond with my wife Amy and my two children, Sam (19) and David (11). We live precisely in the path of where the "wind comes sweeping down the plains."