WSJ editorial: With email revelations, it’s another wonderful day in the neighborHood
Another great editorial from the Wall Street Journal , which long ago saw that Dickie Scruggs and Jim Hood, despite claiming to be clothed with righteousness, were walking around with no pants. The backdrop of this opinion piece is the cache of emails that came from a document subpoena by State Farm in Ex rel. Rigsby , the False Claims Act lawsuit that was supposed to be the centerpiece of the Scruggsification of Katrina litigation, applying that special mix of Scruggs’ secret sauce: "whistleblowers, " folks making off with "insider" documents, add some sweet potatoes, stew it all up with mighty blasts of hot air and do a little home cookin’ in your friendly local magic jurisdiction. Before I talk about the WSJ piece and those emails a little more, I want to point something out about this Rigsby lawsuit. This is the one most people call the Qui Tam , but I don’t, because that sounds like some kind of toenail fungus, so I prefer to call it by its given name. The sand ran out in the timer on the Rigsbys’ 15 minutes of fame some time ago, and I feel sorry for them that they invested all their capital in shares of Scruggs, Inc. right before the doors got padlocked. Somehow they became convinced that wearing a gasoline suit and playing with matches was a great idea. It’s sad, really. What I want to point out is this — after the emails became public, and after I wrote about them here , I looked up the ruling by the federal judge in the District of Columbia that resulted in the Rendon Group being forced to give the emails to State Farm. About three years ago I wrote a chapter in the Appleman on Insurance Practice Guide (shameless plug) about the attorney-client and work product privileges and so I like to think my knowledge in this area of the law is somewhat above average. I was thinking, why weren’t these emails, or at least some of them, protected as work product or by the attorney-client privilege? Not saying they would have been, but I wasn’t clear as to why not. Now, before continuing, let’s take a pause and put a section here that is just for the people who aren’t die-hard, shrieking, soccer-hooligan-like fanatics of this saga. These folks, whom we will henceforth refer to as "normal people," might find useful an overview of this, just of whiff of Secret Sauce. If so, the judge in D.C.
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