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by baybal2
2330 days ago
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From https://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/40738-U-S-Judge-Kapla... >The evidence demonstrates that Chevron sent the funds in 2013 to the account of Max Gitter, a court-appointed Special Master who at the time was working as Senior Counsel at the high-profile corporate law firm Cleary Gottlieb. Gitter is a personal friend and former law partner of Lewis A. Kaplan, the controversial federal judge who presided over the Chevron “racketeering” (or RICO) case and who repeatedly has been accused of bias in favor of the oil giant in its multiyear attempt to try to taint a $9.5 billion environmental judgment against it handed down by Ecuadorian courts. >Gitter and an associate were secretly billing Chevron a total of $1,330 per hour for their work sitting in weeks of depositions leading up to the civil RICO trial, which began in October 2013. That amount is more than many of the indigenous peoples in Ecuador who won the judgment make in one year, said Patricio Salazar, the Ecuadorian lawyer for the Front for the Defense of the Amazon (FDA), the group that represents the affected communities. I think it's 100% clear cut what's going on here |
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Gitter was appointed as a special master for the trial, after having agreed to do a bunch of work, such as mediation, for free. Appointment of a paid special master is a common practice in the Anglo legal system for cases where the Court needs a neutral third party to manage day-to-day issues in a complex matter. The special master is therefore often a lawyer that the judge trusts. (Maybe the practice of appointing special masters could be made more meritocratic, but nothing suggests either the special master or the judge had any prior connection to Chevron.) The special masters fees are paid by the parties.[1] Indeed, contrary to the article's spin, ordering only one side to pay the special master's fees is usually punishment to that party for having done something wrong.[1a] So of course Chevron paid Gitter. That is standard practice. The plaintiffs were also supposed to pay Gitter. But they refused.
The whole thing about the plaintiffs being impoverished farmers who couldn’t afford the special master’s fees is again out of context. The plaintiffs had millions of dollars in funding from multiple investors for the payment of litigation costs.[2]
The point about not paying Gitter’s law firm to make it seem like there was something improper is again specious. Gitter is a retired partner at his firm, which means he has an association but is not a partner or employee. The special master engagement was his personal engagement, not the firm’s. The firm provided a separate bill for the associate who assisted Gitter. (It is a typical courtesy for firms to loan out associates to assist retired partners with their individual engagements.)[3]
Finally, the Second Circuit's opinion upholding the fee award makes clear that while Gitter initially left off descriptions of how he spent the billed time, the court ordered him to provide those descriptions and he did so: https://casetext.com/case/chevron-corp-v-donziger-29
> Chevron's bill of costs contained copies of the bills it had paid for the compensation and expenses of the special masters and their assistant. In the case of one of the two special masters, former Magistrate Judge Katz, the material included detailed, contemporaneous time records. In the case of the other, Max Gitter, Esq., it included invoices showing the hours worked and the billing rates but not time detail. Accordingly, by order dated November 9, 2017, the Court (1) required that Mr. Gitter and Cleary, Gottlieb provide Donziger and the Court with "time records (including any description of services the existing records contain) sufficient to show the services rendered that were . . . included in the bill of costs taxed by the Clerk," and (2) requested that the special masters make a recommendation with respect to the allocation of the special master costs as between the defendants and Chevron. Donziger then was given until December 4, 2017 to object to the reasonableness of the hours devoted to the services performed by any or all of the special masters or their assistant and until December 23, 2017 to object to the special masters recommendation.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_53 ("Payment of the master's fees must be allocated among the parties and any property or subject-matter within the court's control.").
[1a] From above. "A party whose unreasonable behavior has occasioned the need to appoint a master, on the other hand, may properly be charged all or a major portion of the master's fees."
[2] Opinion linked above. "Perhaps more fundamentally, Donziger's focus on his supposed personal circumstances should not blind one to the fact that the litigation with Chevron, including this case, has been financed by third-party funders."
[3] Opinion linked above, footnotes 121-122.