All too often when someone becomes successful, there are others waiting in the wings to grab a piece of the action. Mark Zuckerberg founder and CEO of Facebook was accused of stealing the idea for the social-networking site by the founders of ConnectU.

US firm Quinn Emanuel acted for the claimants and somehow managed to inadvertently declare in its marketing brochure that Facebook paid the founders of ConnectU $65 million to settle the lawsuits.

According to Cal Law : “The ConnectU dispute got started at Harvard, where ConnectU’s founders, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra hired fellow student Zuckerberg to work on code for a dating Web site for Harvard students. They sued Facebook in 2004, accusing Zuckerberg of delaying the project while using the information to start his own Web site. He quit Harvard and moved to Palo Alto to start the company. ConnectU’s lawyers argued that it amounted to trade secret theft and copyright infringement. Last February, Facebook agreed to settle the matter by paying to acquire ConnectU. But soon after, the ConnectU founders claimed they were hoodwinked into a cheap settlement and said they had new evidence implicating Zuckerberg.

Lawyers in the heavyweight fight had expended great effort to keep the settlement secret — even going as far as persuading a judge to clear the courtroom of reporters on one occasion. But ConnectU’s former lawyers from Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges published the settlement amount in a firm advertisement trumpeting the firm’s prowess.

The disclosure was apparently inadvertent. Firm Chairman John Quinn asked The Recorder to not print the amount, citing the confidentiality provision, and declined to comment further.” Whoops!