The Newest Twist in ConnectU v. Facebook

Earlier this year, Facebook reached a settlement in its long-simmering, often embarrassing lawsuit with ConnectU, a Harvard dating site whose founders claim that their one-time employee, then-college sophomore Mark Zuckerberg, stole their idea.
But just because there was a peace accord does not mean the parties in ConnectU v. Faceboook have stopped fighting.
A ConnectU lawyer tried to get out of the deal last week, claiming in a Massachusetts district court that incriminating instant messages found on Facebook’s hard drives yielded smoking-gun evidence of wrongdoing by Facebook‘s founder. ConnectU said they had not seen that evidence, but that a forensic expert had informed Judge Douglas P. Woodlock of its existence.
Judge Woodlock dismissed ConnectU’s argument and speculated instead that the ConnectU founders had a case of “buyer’s remorse” over the settlement.
But that might not be quite right either.
According to case documents in Massachusetts and the related countersuit in a California district court, the ConnectU founders, brothers Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss, and Divya Narendra, have been busy hiring some new legal muscle: the Washington law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner and the stock fraud expert Sean F. O’Shea of O’Shea Partners in New York.
What exactly does that mean?
Most documents in the case are sealed and neither of the parties are talking to the media. But the late-game lawyer swapping and addition of Mr. Shea to the ConnectU counsel table, suggests a new direction in the case. Since the Facebook-ConnectU settlement was likely part-cash, part-stock, one possibility is that the ConnectU founders feel misled by the value of the equity portion of the settlement and believe that fraudulent representations about its value were made to them.
These issues should come to a head on a settlement hearing on June 23 before Federal District Judge James Ware in San Jose, Calif. At the hearing, ConnectU’s lawyers will probably argue that Facebook committed fraud and misrepresented the value of stock included in the settlement.
The fact that ConnectU has added new lawyers and dropped its one-time lawyers at Quinn Emanuel also suggests the possibility that ConnectU could try to hold the law firm responsible for not doing proper due diligence on the settlement. There’s at least one sign of acrimony between ConnectU and Quinn Emanuel: the law firm recently filed a lien against ConnectU for any financial settlement or judgment received by the site.