Quintet of Facebook Lawyers Dispatched to Apologize to Judge

Bloomberg reports:

Days after a judge chastised a law firm representing Facebook Inc. for sending only a junior associate to court in a case alleging the company doesn’t do enough to deter terrorists, a team of five attorneys was dispatched to apologize.

"Your honor, we hear you loud and clear, and we apologize. We feel badly," Craig Primis, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, told U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis on Tuesday.

Garaufis, who sits in Brooklyn, New York, is overseeing two lawsuits in which more than 20,000 victims of attacks and their families accuse Facebook of helping groups in the Middle East such as Hamas. Last week Garaufis questioned Facebook’s "moral obligation" to remove terrorist postings and said he wanted to "talk to someone who talks to senior management at Facebook.”

Primis, whose legal posse included two partners and the associate, told Garaufis he’d also brought along Paul Grewal, Facebook’s deputy general counsel and a former federal magistrate judge in Northern California, to explain how the company views terrorist postings.

"Facebook has every intention of keeping terrorists off Facebook," Grewal told the judge. "We have people working around the world, 24-7, investigating reports of violent statements. So, having identified particular posts, we remove them."

Mistakes were made.