“Trial of the century” and “trial of the decade” are tired cliches. “Tired cliché,” come to think of it, is a tired cliché. Still, Chevron’s civil-racketeering lawsuit against plaintiffs’ lawyer Steven Donziger merits at the very least the “trial of the year” title, as far as corporate legal combat goes.
The trial begins this morning in federal court in Lower Manhattan, and it will be standing-room only in the courtroom. Around the world, the virtual audience will include corporate defenders, human-rights activists, environmentalists, scholars of law and Latin America, and mass-tort devotees of all stripes. Chevron is accusing Donziger of masterminding a conspiracy that culminated in February 2011 in a $19 billion verdict against the San Ramon (Calif.)-based energy giant. The judgment came in a provincial jungle courthouse in Ecuador, where Chevron was found liable for oil pollution committed in the 1970s and 1980s by Texaco, an American company Chevron acquired in 2001. (For more background on the case, check out past Bloomberg Businessweek coverage here, here, and here.)
