2012 Merchandise & Miscellaneous News Archives

April 17, 2012: Lawyer for Superman Heirs Loses Privilege Claim

Superman Court Case Marc Toberoff, the attorney representing the Siegel family in the ongoing dispute over the rights to Superman, was told by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today that he must turn over documents stolen from his office in 2008.

DC Comics and Warner Brothers claim that attorney Marc Toberoff tried to take control of the rights to Superman himself by manipulating Siegel and Shuster's heirs into breaking decades-old agreements.

    "Having set his sights on Superman, Toberoff approached the heirs with an offer to manage preexisting litigation over the rights Siegel and Shuster had ceded to D.C. Comics," Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain wrote for the court. "He also claimed that he would arrange for a new Superman film to be produced. To pursue these goals, Toberoff created a joint venture between the heirs and an entity he owned. Toberoff served as both a business advisor and an attorney for that venture. The ethical and professional concerns raised by Toberoff's actions will likely occur to many readers, but they are not before this court."

    The panel, which included Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, found that "voluntarily disclosing privileged documents to third parties will generally destroy the privilege," and that this does not change just because the third party is the government.

    "Given that Congress has declined broadly to adopt a new privilege to protect disclosures of attorney-client privileged materials to the government, we will not do so here," O'Scannlain wrote.

Source: CourtHouseNews.com.

Click here to read the complete Ninth Circuit's ruling.



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