Counsel Concerns: Ice Cube's Big3 Suit Against League's Lawyers Ends Quietly

Quinn Emanuel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Attorneys with Beys Liston & Mobargha in New York and Freedman + Taitelman in Los Angeles wrote in the complaint that the law firm ignored "inescapable" conflicts of interest when offering to represent the league in a lawsuit brought by ex-commissioner Roger Mason, and used its involvement to shift the defense strategy away from a focus on Qatar's conduct.

"Any rational person would question why a law firm would undertake the representation of a fledgling basketball league that might generate a few hundred thousand dollars in fees when the league was adverse to its existing Qatari clients who generate tens of millions of dollars in fees annually," the complaint claimed. "The only logical answer is that Qatar wanted Quinn to undertake the representation."

"In effect, Quinn would become a spy for Qatar, a nation known for supporting terrorism and aligned with Iran," the complaint asserted.

Mason was fired as commissioner in 2018. The league, which is co-owned by longtime entertainment industry executive Jeff Kwatinetz, contended that Mason was pushed out because he and other Big3 employees had been corrupted by agents of the Qatari government who had promised the previous year to make a multimillion-dollar investment in the league. This was part of the same push for international respectability that informed the country's successful bid for the 2022 World Cup, which, according to the complaint, also depended on bribery and involved the same principals.

The Qatari agents allegedly fell $4 million short on their commitment to put $11.5 million into the league and instead began working to seize control of the league from Ice Cube and Kwatinetz. They next tried to set up a rival three-on-three league and turned to Mason for help, according to the complaint.

Mason filed for an arbitration proceeding against the league after he was fired. Around that same time, according to the complaint, Big3 stakeholder and prominent Los Angeles trial attorney Mark Geragos was being represented by Quinn Emanuel on an unrelated matter, and Robert Raskopf of the law firm's New York office reached out to offer assistance the day after news of the arbitration became public.

According to the complaint, the firm bypassed Kwatinetz and Ice Cube and sent the engagement letter to Geragos & Geragos attorney Ben Meiselas, who signed it as "lawyer." Just as importantly, Quinn Emanuel allegedly did not touch on any of its relationships with the state of Qatar, its royal family and numerous state-owned enterprises. The firm, which received a license to open its first Middle East office in the country in 2017, had yet to formalize a presence there. But the complaint said the firm receives tens of millions of dollars in legal fees yearly from the country and its royal family.

As a consequence of Quinn Emanuel's work on Mason's case against Big3, the league has been hobbled in its goal of highlighting the relationships between Qatar and Mason, the complaint alleged. "With Quinn on the Big3 defense team, Qatar had an agent that it could use to deflect attention away from Qatar's involvement in corrupting Mason and to gather information about Big3," the complaint said.

The league alleged it was billed $1.3 million for less than five months of work and that Quinn Emanuel was seeking to force it into an arbitration proceeding over unpaid fees to be handled by arbitrators at JAMS, which has overseen over 550 disputes involving the firm in the last five years.

Big3 sought a declaration releasing it from arbitration, along with unspecified damages for fraud and breach of fiduciary responsibility.

Quinn Emanuel aimed to recast the matter as a simple fee dispute. In a statement issued after the lawsuit was filed, Quinn Emanuel claimed: "Unfortunately, Big3 doesn't want to pay us for the work we did. Big3 was fully advised about the firm's other various representations and is simply trying to avoid paying its bills."

"No firm fights harder for its clients than Quinn Emanuel, and we fought hard for Big3," the firm said. "After the firm pursued them to collect fees, Big3 waited until a week before the collection arbitration to file this fantasy-laden lawsuit."

*****

Dan Packel covers change and innovation in the legal services market for ALM. He can be reached at [email protected], and on Twitter @packeld.