Lawyers at Facebook have requested a judge to order Paul Cegila to pick up legal fees in excess of $84,000. A $5,000 fine was levied on Cegila earlier this month when he was unable to produce e-mails in his case against Facebook where he claims to have entered into a contract with Mark Zukerberg, the CEO. He claims that the contract entitles him to a 50 percent stake in the company. Facebook has also requested the Federal Magistrate for Buffalo, N.Y., Judge G. Foschio to pass an order which will not allow Ceglia to file any further pleadings or non-responsive papers in the case until he clears the dues.
Dean Boland, Cegila’s lawyer told the Los Angeles Times that he felt the rates charged by the lawyers’ was excessive though he had not yet spared the time to go through the filing yet. The Times also reported that Orin Snyder, the Chief Counsel for Facebook in the case charged $716.25 an hour while his most junior associate charged $337.50 an hour.
Last August, Cegila was ordered by the court to hand over his passwords and other details of his e-mail accounts. However he failed to do so, following which a motion was filed by Facebook requesting him to do the same. However, Jeffrey Lake, Cegila’s attorney at the time said that Cegila had no intentions of complying with the order. Soon after, Jeffery backed out from the case, becoming the latest lawyer to have backed out from representing Cegila since the lawsuit was filed against Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2010.
According to claims by Cegila, he and Zuckerberg entered into a contract in 2003 to develop and design the website that would eventually turn into Facebook, a company which is currently estimated at around $100 billion. Cegila stated that he hired the services of Zuckerberg via an ad on Craigslist to program for a project called StreetFax and advanced a sum of $1,000 to Zuckerberg towards the same. He also added that $1,000 was invested by him in Facebook which entitled him to as much as 50 percent state in the company as well as an additional one percent stake for each day that Facebook project was delayed beyond the initially proposed deadline of January 1, 2004.
