If Chevron outside counsel Randy Mastro of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher has any regret after the Chevron Corporation v. Donziger trial, it could only be that he didn’t request a jury. To any objective observer, the Manhattan bench trial was a rout. Virtually all of Chevron’s claims about serial deception by the lawyers who sued it in Ecuador were persuasive and corroborated. Virtually none of Chevron’s opponents’ explanations were plausible or corroborated. Their star witness, the Ecuadorian ex-judge Nicolas Zambrano, wearing a winter cap with an Angry Birds insignia, flailed on the stand at the most basic questions about the opinion he claims to have written. Chevron nemesis Steven Donziger, who is a master of public relations outside the courtroom, responded with evasions. (Click here for background on the case and links to trial coverage.)
In a few months U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan will issue a doorstop opinion that reflects these evidentiary realities. In due course the arbitrators hearing the meta-dispute between Chevron and Ecuador will do the same. Donziger may win points now or on appeal about the U.S. law implications of Kaplan’s findings of fact, and Ecuador may win points about the international law implications of the arbitration tribunal’s findings of fact. But the facts will stand. And regardless of their formal legal effect, the facts will neutralize the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron, now valued at $9.5 billion. Somewhere along the line as Chevron made its case in U.S. court, the Ecuadorian judgment became unenforceable for laughability. If Donziger’s dreams of recovery weren’t already dead, they died with the gasps in the gallery when the judge in the Angry Birds cap drew blanks about his own purported decision.
