CorpCounsel put two very different whistleblowers on the cover of our magazine over the past three and a half years. And it just so happened that last week brought news about both: One has had some success, claiming he was vindicated when the U.S. Department of Justice finally crawled in off the sidelines—though not to help him directly; the other filed a brief revealing that, far from bringing him riches, his lawsuit has cost him nearly everything he owned.
Let’s start with the second, and note right away that technically he isn’t a whistleblower. He’s a former in-house lawyer at Toyota named Dimitrios Biller, whom Toyota sued for revealing confidential company information. Biller had left the company under pressure, signed a severance agreement that included a strict confidentiality clause (and paid him $3.7 million), and then started a litigation consulting business. (See “Their Worst Nightmare,” December 2010.)
