Legal News

Jungle Litigation: A Look at Chevron?s Ecuadorian Court Battle . . .

By Dan Slater

Since we’ve been doing so much globe-trotting today, let’s keep it going and pay a visit to South America. The American Lawyer just put out a story that takes us “20 miles south of the jungle territory patrolled by Colombian leftist guerrillas” to the “ramshackle” Ecuadorean city of Lago Agrio. It is there, reports AmLaw, “in a dilapidated courthouse,” that a Jones Day team led by Thomas Cullen Jr. is representing Chevron in its battle with 30,000 residents of Ecuador’s Amazon Basin, known as the Amazon Defense Coalition, whose Web address is “www.texacotoxico.org.”

The ADC is represented by by Philadelphia plaintiffs firm Kohn Swift & Graf, and a solo practitioner in Ecuador, Pablo Fajardo, who was profiled in this Vanity Fair article.

The group reportedly hopes to hold Chevron accountable for alleged environmental abuses committed by Texaco, which Chevron bought for $35 billion in 2001. Texaco spent 30 years in the region, pumping billions of gallons of oil hundreds of miles west over the Andes to Ecuador’s port cities for shipment to the U.S. (Click here for a past AmLaw feature on the case — Aguinda v. Texaco.)

But the reason for AmLaw’s follow-up, apparently, is a recent Newsweek piece about the case entitled “A $16 Billion Problem.” (That’s how much Chevron might have to cough up.) “The ultimate issue here is Ecuador has mistreated a U.S. company,” Newsweek quotes one unidentified Chevron lobbyist as saying. “We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this — companies that have made big investments around the world.”

Newsweek reports that after plaintiffs attorney Steven Donziger, of counsel at New York’s Perlmutter & Gimpel, made a presentation to Barack Obama several years ago, the senator co-wrote a letter with Democratic senator Patrick Leahy to U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman, urging Portman to allow the plaintiffs to have “their day in court.” An Obama spokesperson confirmed to Newsweek that Obama’s position on the matter remains the same.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).