
Lemley: Cannot act for Meta in good conscience
A US lawyer representing Meta has publicly announced that he has “fired” the company as a client, citing “Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness”.
Mark Lemley, who both works at US law firm Lex Lumina and is a professor at Stanford Law School in California, has been criticised by some for posting this online, but also attracted support for his stance.
Lex Lumina describes itself as “a new kind of law firm” that combines “globally recognized academic leadership in intellectual property and adjacent fields with the nimble, innovative lawyering necessary to put that knowledge to work today”.
It was acting for Meta in defending a case brought by comedian Sarah Silverman and other authors, who claim that Meta violated their copyrights by training its artificial-intelligence-based large-language model LLaMA with their books. But the firm withdrew from the case this week.
Writing on LinkedIn, Mr Lemley said: “I have struggled with how to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and Neo-Nazi madness.”
He said he had decided against quitting Facebook because of the “great value in the connections and friends I have here, and it doesn’t seem fair that I should lose that because Zuckerberg is having a mid-life crisis”.
But he said: “I have fired Meta as a client. While I think they are on the right side in the generative AI copyright dispute in which I represented them, and I hope they win, I cannot in good conscience serve as their lawyer any longer.”
He added that he had deactivated his Threads account and would be using Bluesky instead, and would no longer buy anything from adverts on Facebook or Instagram.
Mark McKenna, a partner at Lex Lumina and law professor at the University of California, backed the decision.
He posted: “When we started Lex Lumina, one of the things we committed to was only taking cases we felt good about, on the law and in terms of who we represented. Proud to be working with my friend and partner, Mark Lemley, who lived out our commitment today.
“There are lots of good people working at Meta. But this was the right call.”
Many of the replies praised Mr Lemley’s actions. Carrie LeRoy, a partner at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, said: “Mark Lemley taught me intellectual property law at UC Berkeley. Twenty-five years later, he is teaching me what moral courage in lawyering looks like—what resistance and integrity are all about. I sincerely hope that many lawyers will follow his example.”
However, some questioned whether Mr Lemley had breached professional conduct rules.
Eric Cooperstein, an attorney who advises other lawyers on ethics issues, wrote: “I’m looking for the provision in the ethics rules that allows a lawyer to announce publicly that they’re firing a client. Can’t find it…”
Michael McCabe, a specialist ethics lawyer focused on intellectual property, added: “I agree that the lawyer’s public shaming of his client on the way ‘out the door’ is contrary to their duty of confidentiality. It is also tactless and unprofessional.
“Lemley is free to have his opinions and withdraw if he find his client to be repugnant and the withdrawal itself can be accomplished without harming the client…
“But if he can do it in this case, the lawyer can do it in every case, right? The lawyer can quit. But can they call out the client publicly, gratuitously, for no apparent good reason other than to tell the world how wonderful they think they are? Self promotion isn’t a good reason.”
In response to a comment that the fact Mr Lemley represented Meta was already in the public domain and so could not be confidential, Mr McCabe explained that the California rules of professional conduct made even public information confidential, including the fact of representation.
“And whether it is confidential or not this opinion is highly disloyal and possibly breaches his fiduciary duty to his client. He harms Meta his client by not only leaving them midstream (after he accepted thousands in fees) to call his Jewish client a Nazi who is toxic. Seriously, if that isn’t disloyal I don’t know what it is.
“Its obvious impact was to harm his client publicly, affecting the jury pool with adverse pretrial publicity. His case is in active litigation. How can it not hurt? It appears intentionally designed to harm his client, tarnish its image, affect the public perception and even gives fodder for cross examination.”
Lawyer Marcus Hall argued that “whether or not it is specifically covered by a particular ethical rule concerning a public announcement, noisy withdrawals are general frowned upon in practice.
“It’s just a bad look for a lawyer, and god forbid the noisy withdrawal somehow prejudices the client in the current proceeding or one in the future.”
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