The lawyers who successfully represented a Southern California digital design firm in a lawsuit that resulted in a $12.4 million jury verdict last month against Wal-Mart Stores Inc. have asked the U.S. District Court judge to award them court costs and attorneys’ fees.
The amount?
$4.1 million in fees and another $721,000 in expenses.
Mark M. Henry of Fayetteville was one of the attorneys who handled the case for Cuker Interactive LLC of San Diego, which the Bentonville retail giant had hired in 2014 to improve the website for its United Kingdom grocery subsidiary, ASDA Stores Ltd. Cuker — pronounced “Sooker” — was also represented by Henry’s law partner, Adam Hopkins, and Callie Bjurstrom and Michelle Herrera of the Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP law firm’s office in San Diego.
Wal-Mart first filed a routine breach-of-contract lawsuit against Cuker in Benton County in 2014. That sprouted into a federal case and a counterclaim in which Cuker accused Wal-Mart of taking the computer code written for the ASDA site and secretly shipping it off to teams in India and the United States to use in a website for Walmart2Go.
The jury found “three separate findings of willfulness and maliciousness against Walmart,” Cuker’s attorneys said in the motion last week for attorneys’ fees and costs.
Henry spent 1,865 hours on the case, which is equal to more than 45 weeks at 40 hours a week.
A Wal-Mart spokesman had said the company disagreed with the jury’s conclusions.
As of Thursday afternoon, Wal-Mart has not filed a notice of appeal in the case nor had responded to the motion for fees and costs.
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