Elbow room was scarce at the defense table when W.R. Grace & Co. and several former executives stood trial this spring. Every day in a federal courtroom in Missoula, Montana, as many as two dozen attorneys squeezed alongside Grace’s senior in-house litigator. They were fighting criminal charges that Grace and the executives had knowingly contaminated the small town of Libby, Montana, with a toxic form of asbestos, then concealed the deadly threat for years. The source was a mine that Grace had owned and operated for 25 years.
Defense attorneys worried that the overcrowded scene would turn jurors against their clients. “It was a spectacle,” says David Bernick, a Kirkland & Ellis partner who was Grace’s lead outside attorney in the trial. “But there wasn’t a choice.”
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