Sanford Wadler. Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM.

Arguments by Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc. that the $11 million verdict in favor of its fired whistleblowing general counsel, Sanford Wadler, should be reversed or vacated on appeal were called laughable in Wadler's latest brief.

Wadler's attorneys, from San Francisco's Kerr & Wagstaffe, filed the reply brief late Friday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Firm co-founder James Wagstaffe leads Wadler's legal team and partner Michael von Loewenfeldt authored the brief.  Wadler's lawyers did not immediately return calls seeking comment on the case that just won't seem to end.

Wadler sued Bio-Rad in 2015 following his firing. He claimed the dismissal was in retaliation for going over his boss' head and telling Bio-Rad's audit committee that the company may have engaged in bribery in China. A costly internal investigation that followed found no bribery violations.

A federal judge and jury in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California shut Bio-Rad down at trial. But rather than seek to settle the case, the company filed its appeal brief seeking to overturn the verdict in mid-October.

The filing by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan cited four alleged trial errors. They included an improper jury instruction on applying the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; failure to prove that Wadler had an “objectively reasonable belief” of violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; a ruling that barred Bio-Rad from presenting other evidence about Wadler and his motives; and another ruling that allowed the jury to apply the Dodd-Frank Act's whistleblowing provision to the case.

Quinn Emanuel partner William Adams told Corporate Counsel today, “Bio-Rad agrees that the standards for protecting whistleblowers are important. But Congress has prescribed clear standards for such protection that Mr. Wadler did not satisfy in this case.  We look forward to the opportunity to reply to Mr. Wadler's argument in our further briefing and at oral argument.”

But Wadler's lawyers used their 74-page reply not only to dispute the four alleged errors, but also to remind Bio-Rad and the appeals court why the company lost a unanimous verdict in the first place. In elaborate detail, the brief dredged up past Bio-Rad FCPA violations in other countries, and it compared those violations to the China situation.

And it hammered on instances where Bio-Rad execs were found to misrepresent facts at trial, including the post-dating of a termination letter to Wadler.

It argued that SOX and Dodd-Frank were applied correctly, and even if they weren't, there was no prejudicial error in jury instructions. It said the evidence clearly supported the jury's finding that Wadler held an “objectively reasonable belief” that Bio-Rad had violated the FCPA. And it said the two evidentiary rulings were immaterial.

“As a full view of the evidence shows, there was substantial evidence on each element of Wadler's claim, the jury clearly rejected each of Bio-Rad's numerous defense theories, and Bio-Rad's main witnesses had no credibility after being repeatedly impeached and having been caught manufacturing evidence,” the brief said.

The filing concluded, “The assertion that different rulings on these two small evidentiary disputes would have made any difference is risible.”