Makan Delrahim, Assistant Attorney General with the Antitrust Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, speaking at the Federalist Society's 7th Annual Executive Branch Review Conference, on Wednesday, May 8, 2019..

Here's a plaintiff that might give any Big Law litigator pause: Makan Delrahim.

The head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division is on the opposite side of the "v" from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in a new lawsuit against SoCal Edison and Boeing stemming from the 2018 Woolsey Fire, which burned 97,000 acres near Los Angeles and killed three people. 

Gibson Dunn represents Boeing. On Tuesday, firm lawyers including Theodore Boutrous Jr. removed the suit from Los Angeles County Superior Court to U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

According to online property records, Delrahim owns a house in Malibu. In his financial disclosure statements, he values it between $1 million and $5 million—so your basic Malibu crash pad. (The median sale price in Malibu for the first half of 2019 was $3.6 million.)

His house suffered unspecified damage in the fire, and his insurer paid him $83,371. Now, underwriter Lloyds of London is going after SoCal Edison and Boeing as Delrahim's subrogee, seeking reimbursement for the payout.

Represented by Higgs Fletcher & Mack and Skierski Jain, Lloyds faults SoCal Edison equipment for starting the fire when its power lines came into contact with bone-dry vegetation. 

As for Boeing, it owns the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Ventura County, where the fire originated. 

Lloyds says the aerospace giant shares the blame for failing to "take reasonable measures to prevent wildfires from starting due to equipment it allowed on its premises," as well as failing to  "reasonably manage vegetation on its premises." They also fault Boeing because it allegedly didn't "reasonably train, equip, and deploy its own fire suppression unit to combat wildfire that started on its premises" or allow "outside fire suppression efforts" sufficient access to the site.

Lawyers from Higgs Fletcher and Gibson Dunn did not respond to requests for comment.

Although Delrahim does not appear to have any active role in the litigation, the mere presence of his name on the complaint—he is after all the nation's top antitrust cop—gives this passage some extra oomph.

SoCal Edison "enjoys a monopoly which is allowed by law to provide power to consumer and commercial users within Los Angeles and Ventura Counties," the Lloyds lawyers wrote.

"In exchange for their monopoly status and guaranteed rate of return, SCE has to do only two things in connection with the delivery of their product: (1) maintain their equipment in safe operating condition; and (2) ensure that their lines do not come into contact with each other, other parts of their infrastructure, and/or trees and vegetation. The fire started because SCE failed to do either."

Gee, if only some high-level antitrust authorities knew about this sorry state of affairs…