Congressman Barton, you felt it appropriate to apologize to BP for an escrow and arbitration deal that BP has every reason to be positively giddy about.
Our Litigator-in-Chief President, negotiating on behalf of his clients The Cities, Counties, States, Small Business Owners and Residents Along The Gulf, got a rapid settlement deal that's win-win-win for all the parties involved, and breathtakingly brilliant in the eyes of anybody who has the slightest clue how civil litigation works. Which, Mr Barton, obviously does not include you.
I'm not going to talk here about why it's good for the claimants; I'll leave that to other diarists. I'm going to explain why people who love and support oil companies should also be delighted with this deal.
Lawsuits are complicated. They're expensive. They're time-consuming. Class-action lawsuits in particular are a massive undertaking that can occupy entire law firms and whole counties' worth of courtrooms, judges, bailiffs, court stenographers and clerks' offices for years on end. Not only does all that happen at taxpayer expense, it also clogs the courts and slows down all the other cases that are waiting in line for their turn.
Even getting the "class" certified for class-action is a multi-million dollar exercise. Sure, everyone was harmed by the same actions of the particular defendant (who of course would be required to try to put off as much as they can on various codefendants) -- but were all the claimants harmed in the same way? Perhaps there's five or six or fifty classes at stake. There's a trial just to decide if all the plaintiffs should have individual trials.
On to proving liability. There's the expert witnesses who know how drilling should be done. More experts to describe the effect on the water, the economic impact on individuals and businesses and govt agencies, and competing experts to offer an alternate view. The graphic displays. The multiple depositions of every corporate officer or middle manager or on-site representative who has any first-hand knowledge of any portion of the proximate cause of the events at hand. Or the many years' worth of history leading up to those particular events. And all the witnesses, everybody who was on the rig that day or the day before or the week before. And the document production, all of which has to be examined in detail over several months' worth of long days. Now having established liability for one plaintiff, let's repeat the exercise for the next plaintiff. And the next. And the next. Just for shits and giggles, let's do it 95,000 times.
Many years ago, I worked on the Asbestos Litigation. That bundle of lawsuits was such a sprawling, wide-ranging, long-lasting endeavor it had several competing weekly trade magazines. Big-name firms had senior partners who'd been working on it exclusively since they were first-year summer clerks. Asbestos litigation paralegals were headhunted by employment agencies, and could move from state to state and always have a job waiting quicker than they could unpack into new homes. It had been going for 30 years before I started, I haven't worked on it in 30 years, and it's still going on.
Needless to say, the legal fees generated were staggering. There were whole assembly lines writing checks to the plaintiffs and running their paperwork into all the appropriate county offices, week after week after week for decades on end.
If we could have had a Feinberg-style arbitrator with a staff to whip through the claims, our clients (the defendants, all of whom by that time had admitted liability)... would have been so so happy.
BP loves this trust fund, and loves Kenneth Feinberg. The ultimate claims paid out will be about the $ame as they eventually would have been anyway, but without having to pay 50 hours of legal fees per claim. Without dozens of their senior executives having to be deposed for a week at a time, 30 or 40 times. And without entire clerical departments being tied up with document production. As for BP's shareholders -- investors appreciate predictability. That's why BP's stock price went up $7 when this deal was announced.
So to Joe Barton, Michelle Bachman, Rush Limbaugh, and every other wingnut bloviator who claims Obama overstepped his authority, to every supposedly pro-business conservative who says it should have gone through the courts, to every Fox personality who accuses the President of shaking down BP -- please be advised that there's not a single Fortune 500 company that would want any one of you to ever make any decisions on their behalf.
(edited to change title)
