An entertainment production company is claiming in a new lawsuit that its lawyers screwed up documents relating to trademark and copyright and thus ruined its opportunity to make a dance film. The law firm is now being sued for $32 million for alleged errors made.
The suit was filed on Thursday in New York Superior Court by Candela Entertainment, which says it has spent more than a decade and $4.5 million developing a film that was to be entitled dance cuba.
Candela says it retained Davis & Gilbert partner Mary Luria in 2007 to provide advice about transaction and rights issues. The company says that it needed the attorney’s claimed specialty to effectuate and structure third-party financing and make relevant rights claims over the developing property.
But in the complaint, Candela says the transactional work was “materially defective,” and that as a result of allegedly negligent work, it was “unable to properly finance, complete and establish ownership of the dance cuba properties thus sabotaging the financing and completion of the dance cuba motion picture, despite the millions of dollars invested…”
Candela doesn’t spell out the nature of the errors, but alleges that investments were lost and that the company suffered further harm by the inability of Davis & Gilbert to correct the errors. The plaintiff is requesting compensatory damages of $8 million and punitive damages of $24 million.
Davis & Gilbert gave us a response:
“Gilbert is one of the leading intellectual property firms in the U.S. The work the plaintiff hired us to perform was handled completely correctly and professionally. Any issues the plaintiff is facing are unrelated to the work we provided. The plaintiff’s complaint is baseless and frivolous, and we expect to be completely vindicated when the case is decided on the merits.”
E-mail: eriqgardner@yahoo.com
Twitter: @eriqgardner
