FACEBOOK TWITTER RSS APP PODCAST MMA News : Bellator BELLATOR NEWS: Bellator attorney says Zuffa lawsuit will wind up being nothing

Jul 31, 2010 - 10:46:39 AM

By: Jamie Penick, MMATorch Editor-in-Chief

The lawsuit filed this week by Zuffa LLC, parent company of the UFC and WEC, against Bellator Fighting Championships and MMA agent Ken Pavia brought much speculation about the future of the tournament based promotion.

However, according to Bellator's new attorney, Patrick English, the lawsuit will amount to nothing. In comments made to MMAJunkie.com, English explained the nature of the documents received by Bellator from Pavia, and insisted nothing confidential passed hands.

"They weren't, per se, confidential UFC documents that were being talked about," English said. "It was very simple. Bellator was interested in checking on forms that the UFC typically uses in order to see if it was missing anything in terms of its own forms. The types of forms that we're talking about, by and large – there's a form that the UFC uses making sure that the fighters don't use the same colored trunks. There's forms that notify them that they're not supposed to have sponsorship stuff on their attire. There was a form that dealt with termination of contracts. Those are not confidential documents, and the bulk of what we're talking about is that.

"We're not talking about proprietary information, meaning information that would include things like confidential financial information or anything like that."

The UFC's complaint this week admitted they weren't sure exactly what documents were received, and the lawsuit was brought in part due to an email that was obtained from Bellator founder and CEO Bjorn Rebney that, at best, was worded extremely poorly by the Bellator CEO.

The full, unedited email was posted in MMAJunkie's report, and states the following:

"Ken,

Tim and I know that you've been doing great about sending us "All" of the seminal docs from the UFC, so that we can re-do them and implement them for Bellator.

Can you please re-send emails with those attachments. Literally list them 1-TBD.

Please list each in terms of what it is for and how the UFC uses them/implements them.

Please also make sure they are attached and correspondingly listed.

Then I'm going to have our team Monday re-type them and we will sufficiently alter them such that they will appear to be ours and not theirs.

If you can get this over to us late today, that would be great.

Thanks,

B

English acknowledged the poorly worded statements in the email, but was adament that nothing confidential of the UFC's had been transferred to Bellator.

"The bottom line is this: Despite a rather inflammatory email that Bjorn sent out, Bellator has not received – in the bulk of what Ken Pavia sent – confidential information," English said. "I can understand why the UFC would be upset given the email, but I reached out for them to explain exactly what Bellator did receive, and I would hope they'll understand once they understand exactly what was transmitted and why.

"Bellator hasn't actually used anything it was sent. In fairness to the UFC, they don't know that. I'm willing to share with them exactly what that is, and I think that will allay their concerns at the end of the day."

In the end, English doesn't believe this will lead to financial damages of any kind.

"It's very simple: there will be no financial damages because it's a big pile of nothing," English said. "I don't mean this to be critical of the UFC. The UFC simply doesn't know what was sent as of the time they filed this – and frankly, right now. There's absolutely no difficulty sharing with the UFC exactly what was sent and dealing with any concerns they've got.

"It's much ado about nothing. If they knew, they wouldn't have filed the lawsuit, I'm sure. In this particular case, the easiest thing to do is to be forthright and truthful and discuss it with them. It's that simple... This is nothing more than a company making sure it wasn't missing any bases."

Link to Original Source Article

Penick's Analysis: It's quite possible that nothing confidential was passed from Pavia to Bellator, and that what English described as the nature of the documents is all that was done. That said, the email is very eyebrow raising, and the way it was worded does not suggest documents of such a minute nature.

Still, the lawsuit needed to be filed by Zuffa if they had legitimate concerns over what was passed along after seeing the email. If it amounts to them finding out that nothing was improperly passed along that shouldn't have been, they've at least done their due diligence to protect their information. For Bellator's sake, that has to be the case, because if it's more than is being expressed here there could be some definite consequences.

RELATED STORY: UFC/BELLATOR NEWS: Zuffa, LLC sues MMA agent Ken Pavia and Bellator for alleged theft of trade secrets: [CLICK TO READ FULL ARTICLE]

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