BP quickly contains lawsuits
Company has been field-testing legal response for years
By Helen Cox
The Levee slippery writer
The growing slick of lawsuits seeping toward BP since “that whole Deepwater Horizon thing” is being effectively contained, a company spokesperson insists.
(LEVEE illustration/Folwell Dunbar)The company’s success is due to the wide array of techniques BP has been field-testing for years in case such a disastrous quantity of suits were leveled at it simultaneously, BP spokesperson Cassius McFarlow assured reporters.
McFarlow said a 560,000-foot boom of BP lawyers quickly surrounded the company’s headquarters after the disaster began in a desperate effort to protect the company’s fiscal environment.
More than 670,000 barrels of toxically worded, lawsuit-dispersing warning letters to potential litigants were quickly released into the churning sea of claims.
The EPA demanded BP use less-toxic lawsuit dispersants, but the company insisted on using its most toxic attorneys first.
BP officials initially estimated 1,000 lawsuits per day were spewing toward them, but independent legal groups have indicated the rate is easily five times that, judging from careful studies of angry blogs describing litigious intentions.
Seventeen BP-attorney staging areas have been put into place in coastal locations where fishermen are threatening to sue over potential loss of livelihood.
According to McFarlow, fishermen are being told not to worry because “oil doesn’t really taste that bad on fish anyway and people probably won’t notice” and “those white shrimp boots will go great with your new, fully subsidized HAZMAT suits.”
One of BP’s most successful methods of combating the flow of oil has been hiring Halliburton to “do something” in the Gulf because when things go horribly awry, “who can resist just assuming it was all Halliburton’s fault?” Halliburton blame operations manager Dennis Frank said.
“Halliburton is the world leader in being right smack dab in the middle of colossal screw ups. We took an enormous amount of flak for the Bush Administration in Iraq, and we’re going to apply those lessons to this disaster as well,” Frank said.
Legal analysts marveled at BP’s ability to continually minimize the disaster, dissipating the impact of possible legal assaults.
“Every time someone compulsively calls a 1-800 lawyer after hearing one of BP’s low-ball environmental impact statements, or reading about our billions in profits last quarter, they’re more likely to file a weak, poorly thought out ‘tar ball’ complaint,” Tulane environmental law professor Hucaire A. Boutchafish said.
Such lawsuits are expected to be much easier to deal with than large slicks of gooey class-action litigation, which could seriously erode BP’s stock ecosystem.
McFarlow defended the company’s legal-containment effort.
“Given the inherent danger of deep-water drilling, we’ve spent years putting everything in place to deal with a flood of lawsuits exactly like this,” McFarlow said.
But McFarlow insisted BP is not resting on its laurels and will seek innovative new ways to deal with the lawsuit threat as it evolves “over the coming months, years, and probably, decades.”
Asked if he expects BP to fare better than Exxon, which was able to reduce its damages in the Exxon Valdez lawsuit spill to under $15,000 per litigant after two decades in the courts, McFarlow was optimistic.
“Legal technology has come a very long way since then,” he said. “We expect to have this entire situation under control in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost.”
“Many executive careers were destroyed in that tragic incident. We’ve made a commitment not to allow that to happen to our Gulf Coast Business Unit.”
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