HOUSTON -(Dow Jones)- A prominent national law firm on Monday sued Chevron Corp. (CVX) and its legal counsel, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP, for allegedly attempting to derail its representation of Ecuadorian plaintiffs in a multi-billion dollar environmental lawsuit.
Patton Boggs LLP, in a filing with a U.S. court in the District of Columbia, accused Chevron and its attorneys of “tortuous interference” in the relationship between the firm and its clients, indigenous groups suing Chevron for alleged environmental damage done by Texaco Inc. in Ecuador’s Amazon region. The case, being heard by a court in Ecuador, was inherited by Chevron after it bought Texaco in 2001.
Chevron, which denies the allegations of environmental damage, has conducted since 2009 an aggressive legal campaign to thwart the effect of any adverse ruling by the Ecuadorian court. The company, after obtaining through U.S. courts thousands of pages of internal documents from the plaintiffs, last week sued the plaintiffs in a New York federal court for allegedly manufacturing evidence. The plaintiffs have denied claims of fraud.
The San Ramon, Calif.-based energy giant has also filed a lawsuit seeking to have Patton Boggs removed from the case, claiming that having done prior lobbying work for Chevron creates a conflict of interest. In the latest suit, Patton Boggs says that its prior work with the oil company does not disqualify it from representing the Ecuadorian plaintiffs, and says Chevron’s accusations of fraud constitute an escalation of its harassment. Patton Boggs seeks to stop Chevron from getting it removed from the case.
A Chevron spokesman said that the filing by Patton Boggs was “frivolous.” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., an attorney with Gibson Dunn, said in a statement that the lawsuit was incoherent and “baseless.”
Patton Boggs began working with the plaintiffs in the decades-long lawsuit last year, after the Philadelphia law firm that had been on the case since 1993 pulled out in the midst of Chevron’s latest legal maneuver.
Patton Boggs aims to help the plaintiffs enforce the Ecuadorian court’s ruling in other countries should they end up winning the case.
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