dimitrios biller was hired by toyota to oversee their strategy in dealing with rollover litigation in the southwest. he was hired to be the strong arm that wouldn’t back down. they had no idea how right they were.

in the course of doing his job dimitrios found that toyota was lax in producing documents for discovery that (he believed) they were required to produce. he felt they were hiding something. he came to suspect that there were design flaws in toyota vehicles, flaws known by the company, that they were trying to prevent potential plaintiffs from finding out about. he brought the matter to the attention of toyota’s general counsel and was ignored. he complained again and was reprimanded. he alleges that he was being asked to withhold or destroy evidence that would have been harmful to the company. instead, he says, he kept it aside.

eventually the pressure got to be too much, and dimitrios left toyota in 2007. the company paid him almost four million dollars to go away. but he didn’t disappear quietly. he filed a lawsuit against toyota, against the company’s general counsel and even the previous GC before that. he alleged that toyota was “a criminal enterprise.”

it wasn’t entirely without provocation. after leaving toyota dimitrios started his own private practice, but he felt that his previous employers and colleagues were badmouthing him to potential clients, making it difficult for him to get work. surprisingly, it was toyota who sued first.

dimitrios had set up a website for his new company on which he listed cases he was involved in for toyota, as well as a letter of recommendation from toyota’s general counsel praising his management and trial capabilities. when toyota saw that site it fired first, claiming that he disclosed confidential information and statistics about their litigation history. they sued him, asking for $35 million in damages due to a violation of the confidentiality agreement that was part of biller’s severance.

dimitrios fired back. he claimed the confidentiality clause was illegal, requiring him to withhold knowledge of criminal activity perpetrated by toyota.

when i met dimitrios this was all still up in the air. if he wins it’s huge, potentially providing ammunition for everyone trying to sue toyota in a rollover accident case. toyota has been mired in problems the past year anyway, due to that acceleration problem. this could make a sticky gas pedal recall look like peanuts.

dimitrios’ life for the past three years has been consumed with this litigation. he tells me he’s literally done nothing else. his office now is in a guest house in the backyard of his mother’s place, a house he bought for her with his severance money. he seemed stressed out, but optimistic. he seemed like a guy who felt deeply that he was in the right.

that being said, it seems in recent weeks that things have resolved, though not in the way dimitrios would have liked. on march 17th a district court judge in california rejected dimitrios’ claims, and furthermore ordered him to pay $2.6 million to toyota. read about the ruling here. according to the article dimitrios plans to appeal.

the first thing a subject says when they show up for their photo session usually sets the tone for the rest of the shoot. sometimes you know it’s going to be bad right out of the gate. other times, when you expect the status quo, the subject surprises you. the very first thing out of pierce o’donnell’s mouth, after we exchanged names and pleasantries and hellos, was a dirty joke. not a comment or a quip, but one of those long, drawn out, getting-ready-for-the-punchline sort of jokes that not many people tell – or tell well – anymore. i’m kicking myself for not being able to remember it, though i’m sure it was altogether inappropriate for the polite company of the internet. corporal bennett and i immediately had the same thought: i like this guy.

pierce is a lawyer, but he also writes novels. he’s sued movie studios, sued for movie studios, and won almost a billion dollar settlement for victims of hurricane katrina. he’s also had a few professional hiccups and scandals along the road, in a story that’s a bit too complicated to go into at the moment, but read the full article here.

my thanks, as always, to maggie.

dibromochloropropane (DBCP) is a chemical pesticide. manufactured by dow, it was used in the 1970s on crops grown in the US and abroad. DBCP was found to cause sterility in workers at the dow plant where it was manufactured. dole foods, one of the world’s biggest producers of fresh fruits and vegetables, stopped using DBCP on its banana crops in latin america in 1977, when dow ceased production of the chemical. over the years dole (and dow) have settled many lawsuits from workers who claimed to have been affected  by DBCP. a DBCP trial in 2007, though, took a bizarre turn.

dole was being sued by 54 men who claimed to have been made sterile while working in their banana fields in nicaragua in the 70s. michael carter, dole’s general counsel, thought something sounded fishy, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. dole lost that first trial, a jury awarded damages of 5 million dollars to six of the workers. then the weirdness started.

a mystery witness – who they actually referred to as “witness X” – came forward in nicaragua and revealed some surprising things. he said that the whole thing was a fraud put together by the plaintiff’s lawyers. he said that some of the workers suing dole had never actually worked on their banana fields. he revealed that some workers who claim to have been made sterile by DBCP decades ago even had children. witness X alleged that even the judge in nicaragua was in on the scam. carter flew witness X out to LA right away. then he got scared and refused to testify.

carter hired rudy perrino as an in-house litigator to handle all the fraudulent claims. for extra backup he hired ted boutrous, andrea neuman and scott edelman of gibson, dunn & crutcher. boutrous was an expert in dealing with punitive damage awards in litigation, edelman was good with the judges and juries and neuman was good at getting people to relax and be revealing.

neuman interviewed some of the plaintiff’s wives, many of whom had stories that were wildly inconsistent with their husband’s accounts. they got witnesses to practically admit to memorizing false testimony fed to them by the plaintiff’s attorneys. in the end, from the one witness X, carter and his team got 27 people to come forward and admit to the fraud.

while this was all going on a documentary was made about the original 2007 trial in which dole was found at fault. the documentary made no mention of the fraud behind the case. dole tried to stop the film’s release, to no avail. in the end the filmmakers gave in somewhat and put a brief text acknowledgment at the conclusion of the documentary that mentioned the allegations against the plaintiff’s attorneys.

it’s always an easy out to assume that the giant multinational corporation is, at its heart, inherently evil and poisoning us. how strange it must be, and how difficult it must be, to turn one’s thinking around and admit that – for once – the giant corporation may actually not be as guilty as we thought.

in many photo shoots there exists a moment when it becomes possible to drastically shift the whole dynamic, tone and message of the picture. sometimes this shift happens in a decidedly weird or silly direction. then again, i’m a big believer in the idea that you can do very absurd things in photographs just so long as you play it totally straight.

i don’t generally like smiling pictures. you may have already noticed this by now. that is to say, i don’t like it when people smile because they’re being photographed. at it’s very best that’s disingenuous. people are usually not particularly happy about being in a picture. at it’s worst it’s just plain insincere. i always tell my subjects that they are absolutely free to smile in my pictures if the smiles are real – if something is funny, let’s say. very often things are funny, i’d like to think my subjects usually end up enjoying our sessions, though at the end i find that the serious pictures resonate with me much more. perhaps this has to do with my inherent cynicism or pessimism. that’s possible. perhaps it’s got something to do with people often grinning like idiots. hard to say.

anyway, we were photographing brandon for a serious publication, for a serious article; about lawyers who had been laid off of their jobs. brandon was recently let go from his firm and instead of going after a new law job he decided to take his legal talents into the music industry as artist management and promotion. the idea was to photograph him at home (where he conducted most of his new work) and see what life was like for the out-of-work lawyer.

once we were partway through the first set up i happened to notice that on the top of his bookshelf brandon had a plastic optimus prime robot helmet. sometimes you just have to ask. i mean, really. you have to ask. you’ve got nothing to lose. so i asked. and brandon said yes. he put the robot helmet on and got back into the same shot, and everything changed. the helmet even had a voice modulator so that when he talked it sounded like a cool plastic robot voice.

paul and i both knew that the magazine was highly unlikely to ever use these pictures. even brandon knew they were unlikely to be published. maybe that’s why he was so agreeable. but damn if that didn’t make the day a whole lot more special than i thought it was going to be when i loaded up the car in the morning. at the very least i thought the photo editor would have a chuckle going through the take.

the funny thing is brandon said he loved wearing the robot helmet. why, you ask? he said:

“i can smile in here, and you can’t tell.”

and just to reassure any current or future clients who may be thinking of hiring me (you’re saints, each and every one of you. . .) don’t worry: i did variations without the robot helmet, too. ultimately one of these were published, as the picture was just one of many in a larger story, and for some totally unexplainable reasons nobody else was wearing a plastic optimus prime mask on their heads. i know, hard to believe.

a couple weeks after these pictures were taken i was at a target and i saw a whole display with about two dozen optimus prime robot helmets. they were $30. i have to tell you, in all honesty, i stopped in front of that display for a very long time and thought long and hard about buying one just to keep in the light case. i mean, you never can tell.

my thanks to the indefatigable maggie for continually hiring me despite silly things like this. you’re a saint among saints, indeed.

in the summer of 1998, in a small town in ohio, a 5 year old girl was killed, stabbed in the throat. anthony harris was twelve years old at the time, one of very few african american kids in town. after a couple weeks of searching for the girl’s killer, police arrested anthony and interrogated him. they used a technique meant for adults, meant to elicit confessions in cases where there was already significant evidence. it’s also commonly known that this technique can elicit false confessions in children. so anthony confessed. he was scared, confused and tired. but he wasn’t the killer.

the forced confession was all the evidence the prosecutor had against him, but it was enough. he was sentenced to prison where he spent two years waiting for his lawyers to overturn the conviction. the original prosecutor and judge remained convinced of anthony’s guilt despite acknowledging that the confession was coerced. but he was a free man, he rejoined his family, he went to high school. when he tried joining the marines his past was dug up and he was denied. a year later he tried joining the army and was again denied. in the meantime there was a civil suit ongoing. eventually this was settled for over three and a half million dollars. anthony’s name was cleared, finally. he joined the marines in 2006, has served one tour in iraq, and when i went to meet him he was expecting to head to afghanistan sometime in the near future.

i met up with anthony in his hotel room in san diego. he was on leave for the weekend, seeing a girlfriend, looking to buy a house with some of his settlement money. he didn’t talk much about the case, which i can understand. sometimes when you spend your whole life trying to put something behind you the last thing you want to do is keep explaining it to people. we set up the shots while anthony went to drive his girlfriend home, though somehow that short trip ended up taking him over two hours. ordinarily this kind of behavior annoys me, but really, there are some people who deserve to be cut a little slack. he’s got to be one of them, right?

my thanks to corporal bennett for his gracious assistance, and to the incomparable maggie soladay at the american lawyer magazine for picking a really unconventional shot for the opener. that’s really cool, maggie, and i very much appreciate it.

see the whole story here.

i’ve been meaning to post these pics for a while now, but i’ve been struggling to figure out how to explain the story concisely. in the end, i think i gave up trying to explain it. there was (is?) an ongoing pension scandal in the city of san diego with city workers, but the story is very convoluted and a little hard to follow and likely not particularly interesting unless you really, really enjoy being a securities lawyer.

for my money, even though i didn’t really understand the legalese involved, i found the key players to be very interesting to talk to. the main subject in the story is san diego city attorney mike agguire (above). the son of a boxer, he’s called a “bulldog” by his enemies. aguirre seemed to be the driving force behind the pension investigation that – and i know i’m going to screw this up – i think involved many people getting overinflated pension benefits illegally, while at the same time robbing the system of sufficient funds to finance those pensions. regardless of my inability to be a lawyer, mike aguirre was one of the smartest guys i’ve gotten to talk to in a long, long time. he’s one of those guys who immediately seems fiercely intelligent the second he opens his mouth. i left there with a very good impression of the guy, and i always admire someone who’s so open as a photo subject. in his defense, we shot these pics on a sunday. he was still at work, but with shorts and sandals. hey, it’s san diego.

other key players, also working with aguirre were don “the rat” mcgrath and bryan vess. don is the assistant city attorney, and all of us at the magazine spent some time trying to figure out why he was called “the rat”. there was speculation amongst the photo department that he might look rodent-like, perhaps, though this proved not to be the case. the real reason: it was a nickname he had in college (no explanation why, and also no explanation as to why he would choose to keep it many, many years later). bryan vess is an outside attorney hired to help with the investigation. this has been ongoing for a long while, you can see all the document boxes surrounding bryan. in case you all think being a lawyer is glamorous, imagine having to go through all that paperwork just to find something that might help your case. no thanks! wait a second, though, lawyers get to bill in 15-minute increments, right? maybe that’s not so bad.

i just heard from bryan vess that mike aguirre just lost the election and is no longer the city attorney in san diego. i wouldn’t count the guy out, though. he’s got some fight in him. all i know is if someone’s suing me, i want that guy on my side.