Warner Bros Now Suing 'Superman' Rights Lawyer

As originally posted on SupermanLives.net

Deadline reports:

Warner Bros has lost too many rights cases against its arch-nemesis, lawyer Marc Toberoff, especially the ongoing Superman litigation.

So recently the studio hired Daniel Petrocelli to come up with a new strategy to prevent the studio from losing the rights to Superman in 2013 as a court has previously ruled, and Petrocelli has obliged. His hardball tactic: to get rid of Toberoff entirely.

This morning, Warner Bros' new outside counsel is filing a lawsuit against Toberoff raising questions about his role as a financial participant in the Superman rights and not as the attorney for the Shuster and Siegel families fighting their Superman cases. The purpose of the lawsuit is to put Toberoff in a position where he may have to resign as the Siegel and Shuster attorney altogether. 

It's a hardball, and some might say despicable, tactic by Petrocelli and the studio, especially because it hinges on documents stolen from Toberoff's office by a Toberoff employee. (Warner Bros claims the documents mysteriously "arrived" on its doorstep and that the employee was a lawyer in Toberoff's firm and a "whistleblower". Toberoff has indicated that something much more nefarious may have happened.) 

What's also ironic about Petrocelli's tactic is that, when he defended Disney against the Slesinger family's Winnie The Pooh underpaid royalty claims, he was able to get the entire case thrown out of court by alleging that the Slesinger's were basing some of their documentation on paperwork "stolen" from a dumpster on the Disney lot.