Hit by a historic judgment in Ecuador, Chevron Corp. used cloak and dagger to expose a historic fraud. Michael D. Goldhaber of NLJ affiliate The American lawyer has written about the case in “Crude Awakening,” a book available on Kindle Single. Here are excerpts from his account.
Forum Shopper’s Revenge
When Ecuadorean plaintiffs first sued Chevron Corporation over oil pollution 21 years ago, R. Hewitt Pate was a recent U.S. Supreme Court clerk reviewing documents in the warehouses of Virginia. With the passage of time, antitrust document review became the province of humble contract attorneys. Pate ascended to Chevron general counsel. And the Ecuador case kept going, and going, shifting at Chevron’s behest from courts in the United States to Ecuador and then back. There was no doubt that Chevron suffered from forum shopper’s remorse, as we called it in our April 2010 cover story.
