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Ex-Toyota Lawyer Holds Tight to Whistleblower Suit
The Recorder
October 22, 2009
Dimitrios Biller and Samuel Wilner drove 3 1/2 hours from Dallas to Marshall, Texas, on the warm last day of September, carrying four banker's boxes of documents that could prove that Toyota hid evidence in death and injury accident cases.
Biller had organized the documents chronologically, packing them in the Toyota boxes he'd been given to take his stuff when he left the company's legal department two years ago. He flew with Wilner, an old friend and fellow lawyer, from his home in Los Angeles to personally deliver the boxes to the federal courthouse in Marshall.
"Those boxes of documents are very important to me," Biller said this week. "I'm not going to turn them over to Federal Express -- it's not happening." It was the end of a wild month that started when the TV news networks discovered Biller's whistleblower lawsuit accusing the automaker of concealing and destroying evidence to keep "its vehicles' structural shortcoming from becoming known" in hundreds of cases. Toyota has issued several press releases to discredit Biller, who was its national manager of rollover litigation from 2003 to 2007.
Plaintiff lawyers are now trying to reopen cases, like Lopez v. Toyota , in which the Lopez family alleges that the seat recliner failed when their Toyota Corolla was rear-ended and the father's seat smashed his daughter in the face, causing her to be blinded in one eye. It was the effort to reopen that case, and others in Texas, that drew Biller to hand-deliver the four boxes .
Biller, 47, has never been one to let things out of his grasp. As a younger lawyer at Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro in Los Angeles, several former colleagues say, Biller would grab onto an argument or an issue and never let go. He believed in his cases with an earnestness that sometimes surprised colleagues and opponents.
But in later years, Biller may have lost a grip on his own emotional state. In his own lawsuits, Biller says he suffered "a complete mental and physical breakdown" while working at Toyota and was diagnosed with major depressive disorder.
And at his next job, as a trainee in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office, he suffered a tear-filled breakdown after being criticized, according to a wrongful termination suit he filed against the DA's office in May.
"I'm heavily medicated, so I function on a day-to-day to basis," Biller said this week, in his first media interview since his Toyota suit hit the news.
Biller left Toyota in 2007 with a hefty $3.7 million severance package after he accused the company of forcing him to quit. (He signed a confidentiality agreement, but contends it isn't binding.)
In 2008, Toyota sued Biller for allegedly publicizing confidential Toyota information with his new e-discovery consulting business LTD Consulting. This July, Biller filed his 75-page whistleblower suit (.pdf) against Toyota, alleging that other Toyota lawyers conspired to hide evidence.
A SERIOUS GUY
Biller's doggedness was often an asset as a lawyer at Pillsbury.
In a case against Prudential Insurance in the 1990s, Biller uncovered a memo that the defendants said didn't exist and helped prove his clients' case. As an associate, he earned the trust of Pillsbury partners and was part of a small group of Los Angeles Pillsbury lawyers that did plaintiff work at what had always been a defense-side firm. He made partner in 1999 and worked big cases like one against Sunset Insurance that netted a $110 million settlement in 2002.
"He was a real solid lawyer," said one former colleague. "But sometimes, he didn't have the sense of when to let an issue go."
"I won't let points go if the point is evidence that will help my client or if the point involves honesty," Biller said.
Biller says he took his cases personally. In fact, he left Pillsbury in 2003 to work for Toyota with the hopes that he would get more time away from the kind of litigation that had consumed him at the firm. That didn't happen.
"I didn't want to work as hard as I was working, because I wasn't spending enough time with my family," Biller said. "Unfortunately, I didn't realize, when you move jobs, you take your personality to the other job."
As national managing counsel in charge of rollover accident litigation involving the popular 4Runner sport utility vehicle, Biller managed the cases very closely.
"He was hard-nosed, almost obsessive-compulsive, about cases," said E. Todd Tracy, a Texas plaintiff lawyer who sued Toyota on many occasions. Tracy is the lawyer trying to reopen 17 cases because of Biller's revelations.
Tracy said he went to trial at least 25 times against Biller's team -- and didn't win a case. The Toyota lawyers would grind plaintiffs down, requesting deposition after deposition, and putting on expert after expert, the plaintiff lawyer said.
"People thought on the plaintiff side that he was a mean-spirited bastard," Tracy said.
Biller exchanged only the briefest of pleasantries with Tracy, never even going as far as making small talk. And during one trial that Toyota won, Newman v. Toyota , Tracy was making his way to the back of the courtroom when he walked into Biller -- and neither would move out of the way.
"We were like two bucks going to engage," Tracy said. "We butted shoulders ... it was unintentional contact, but neither would give."
TEARS AND ANGER
Biller says he's emotional guy.
Sometimes after he won a personal injury case for Toyota, he would look over the documents and cry because he "just felt a lot of empathy" for the plaintiffs, he said.
Biller joined the L.A. district attorney's office last summer after leaving Toyota. Much older than the rest of the prosecutors-in-training, he regularly clashed with his supervisors and lasted just three months on the job.
"The young people thought I was like God," said Biller with a laugh. "My immediate supervisor thought I was shit."
In the detailed and colorful 91-page complaint against the DA (in two parts: .pdf, .pdf), Biller claims that his supervisor, Victor Rodriguez, got on him for being "too formal." Rodriguez told him, "You don't have to stand up when addressing the court," and "You have to unbutton your jacket because you look too stiff."
After Biller fought with the sheriff's office over deputies not being in court, things spiraled, according to his lawsuit. He cried after losing a case. And his supervisor wrote that Biller's "inability to control his emotions, his extreme reactions to routine, commonplace setbacks and his unpredictable and violent outbursts when upset pose serious harm to himself and others," a characterization that Biller contests in his suit. Lawyers from the DA's office declined to comment.
At a January hearing in Toyota's lawsuit against Biller, Los Angeles County Judge John Segal asked a bailiff to come into the courtroom because "the court perceived the tone and the manner in which [Biller] was speaking to be threatening," Segal wrote in an order. Biller contested that order and tried to have the judge disqualified.
Biller, who is Greek, says that he doesn't have an anger problem.
"Greeks are very passionate people," Biller said. "What somebody may call intense, I just call passionate."
'LET THE WORLD KNOW'
Biller won't talk about exactly why he decided to blow the lid with his lawsuit against Toyota, but said it's in the public's interest. He won't say what's in the four boxes he took to Texas, but says he has investigated instances where documents should have been turned over and weren't. For example, Biller claims that Toyota never disclosed that it had an internal standard for how close a roof should be to dummies' heads during crash tests, and never turned over the relevant information in discovery during 20 years of rollover litigation.
"I want the world to know what happened," he said. "I'm not afraid to let the world know."
The suit targets his former supervisors, including the company's general counsel, Christopher Reynolds, with accusations of racketeering.
Biller says his disagreements with Toyota first began when electronic discovery demands from the rollover plaintiffs began increasing in 2004. He warned his superiors that the company was not being forthcoming, but his warnings were ignored. For his efforts, Biller says, he received a poor work evaluation.
In the spring of 2007, according to his complaint, Biller's physical and mental health began deteriorating under intense pressure at work. He took a medical leave in June, and was "forced to resign" in September 2007.
Toyota, which declined to comment, called Biller's allegations "misleading and inaccurate" in a lengthy press release .
"Mr. Biller's actions and the timing of his lawsuit do not support his claim that he is motivated by the public interest," company said. "Mr. Biller's actions have been motivated by his own personal financial interests."
Toyota also paints him as frequent litigant and makes sure to point out that "Mr. Biller claims he is disabled and has suffered from organic brain disease 'for most of his life.'"
Several former colleagues from Pillsbury or Toyota either didn't want to comment publicly or wouldn't say anything at all. Biller said he's gotten a similar reaction, with almost none of his old colleagues reaching out to him. "I don't think anyone wants to have anything to do with me," he said.
Biller said he spends most of his time working on his cases against Toyota and L.A.'s district attorney. He works out of his home in Pacific Palisades, a tony enclave that's home to the rich and famous, where he's lived with his wife and two children since 2007. In the case against Toyota, Jeffrey Allen of Allen & Wohrle is representing him. And his old friend Wilner is also helping him out.
Though he has lawyers to represent him, Biller sounds like a very hands-on client.
"I always prepare for trial from day one -- that's my approach," Biller said. "I could try this case against Toyota."
