This article was adapted from the Kindle Single ebook “Crude Awakening,” by Michael D. Goldhaber, available Aug. 20 on Amazon.com.
When Ecuadorean plaintiffs first sued Chevron Corporation over oil pollution 21 years ago, R. Hewitt Pate was a recent U.S. Supreme Court clerk reviewing documents in the warehouses of Virginia. With the passage of time, antitrust document review became the province of humble contract attorneys. Pate ascended to Chevron general counsel. And the Ecuador case kept going, and going, shifting at Chevron’s behest from courts in the United States to Ecuador and then back. There was no doubt that Chevron suffered from forum shopper’s remorse, as we called it in our April 2010 cover story.
