A Costly Battle

If it sometimes seems that the whole 
AmLaw 100 is working on the Chevron-in-Ecuador case, that estimate may not be far off. According to a letter filed March 1 in New York federal district court by the Ecuadorian camp, Chevron is now using more than 2,000 legal professionals from 60 law firms, including 114 lawyers from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, to fend off the $19 billion environmental judgment obtained by plaintiffs in an Ecuadorian court in February 2011. In that case, Ecuadorian plaintiffs claim that Chevron’s predecessor, Texaco, failed to clean up wastes from oil drilling in the Amazon River basin; Chevron says that its environmental remediation was adequate, and has challenged the Ecuadorian judgment in U.S. district court in New York, contending that the Ecuadorian decision was ghostwritten by the plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs’ March 1 letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan complains that Chevron, in the three previous months, submitted a 15,000-page privilege log, 6 million pages of discovery documents, and 224 legal filings just in New York, where Chevron is pressing its fraud and Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations case against the Amazonian plaintiffs and their advisers in the underlying case, including U.S. counsel Steven Donziger. The Ecuadorian team told Kaplan that he would be presiding over a "show trial" unless he modifies the scheduling order and places limits on Chevron.