Westinghouse Sues Three Legal Firms
In an unusual lawsuit that touches on issues ranging from legal ethics to nuclear power plant safety, Westinghouse Electric has sued three law firms, charging them with “purloining” confidential documents and using them to stir up other lawsuits against Westinghouse.
The complaint, filed Wednesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is what some observers called an aggressive, “hard-ball” response by Westinghouse to a dozen suits that have been filed against it during the last decade over alleged defects in steam generators installed at several nuclear power plants.
In its complaint pressing for damages from the law firms, Westinghouse said it would not be facing those lawsuits were it not for what it describes as illegal, conspiratorial and unethical activity by the law firms. The firms named in the Westinghouse complaint are: Los Angeles-based Chase, Rotchford, Drukker & Bogust; Washington-based Newman & Holtzinger, and Shaw, Pittman Potts & Trowbridge, also of Washington.
The law firms all said Thursday that the accusations were without merit. “We see this litigation as an effort by Westinghouse to create something of a sideshow to distract from these cases (against it),” said Timothy Hanlon, a partner at Shaw Pittman.
Ethics experts said that while the lawsuit raises interesting issues regarding the actions of the attorneys involved, it also brings up more significant questions of how well public interests are served by the common practice of keeping some records in court cases confidential.
The squabble actually stems from a 1983 lawsuit filed by Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric, which together operated the San Onofre nuclear power plant. In that suit--which is still pending--the utilities are seeking to recoup more than $250 million in costs of shutting down the power plant for 14 months, beginning in April, 1980, while it made repairs to the steam generators. That suit accuses Westinghouse of breach of contract, negligence and failure to disclose information about the equipment.
The utilities said the tubes within the generator were corroding because of inherent flaws in the materials used. Leaks in the tubes could send radioactive contamination into the non-radioactive side of the system.
Other utilities have sued in the years since, saying that Westinghouse knowingly sold them steam generators with defective parts and misled them about the durability of the generators.
But in its suit this week, Westinghouse contends that Newman & Holtzinger and Chase Rotchford--which represented Southern California Edison--knowingly, and in violation of a court protective order, placed into public record confidential, in-house documents shared by Westinghouse in connection with the 1983 suit.
Westinghouse said those law firms then “solicited” Shaw Pittman to use the documents to urge other utilities to sue Westinghouse.
Altogether, there have been 12 or 13 such cases against Westinghouse, according to Louis J. Briskman, deputy general counsel for the Pittsburgh-based firm. Settlements have been reached in two or three of the cases; one is in arbitration, and nine lawsuits are pending.
Shaw Pittman is representing utilities in five of the suits.
Ronald J. Gilson, a professor at Stanford Law School, said there are three distinct issues. One is whether the two law firms violated a protective order, and another is whether the third firm actually solicited law suits. A more important issue, he said, concerns keeping information relevant to the case concealed under cover of the court’s protective order.
