It’s all about the facts. That’s what 91-year-old Covington & Burling senior counsel Jim McKay emphasizes when he talks about his long career as a trial lawyer. And he remembers them vividly.
Take, for instance, the criminal antitrust case McKay tried back in 1952 for E.I du Pont de Nemours and Company, which was indicted with about a dozen other defendants for allegedly fixing the price of automobile spray paints. As McKay recalls it, one minor fact in the case turned out to be key. During depositions, a witness had remarked that the head of DuPont’s paint division, a defendant in the case, had been complaining about his teeth. So McKay and his colleagues obtained his dental records. They showed that at the very moment the government claimed the defendant was at a meeting in Cleveland fixing prices, the defendant was actually having a wisdom tooth extracted. The jury returned a verdict in DuPont’s favor.
