History
In 1997, a junior associate at Baron & Budd, P.C., a law firm founded in part by Fred Baron accidentally produced to the defense counsel a twenty-page memo titled "Preparing for Your Deposition." Republican Senator Jon Kyl, a tort reform advocate, called the memo a "a startling insight into how asbestos claims are created"; in a Senate Report, Kyl writes that the memo:
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- gives clients detailed instructions how to credibly testify that they worked with particular asbestos products. The memo also instructs clients to assert particular things that will increase the value of their claim, without regard to whether those things are true. The memo even informs clients that a defense attorney will have no way of knowing whether they are lying about their exposure to particular asbestos products.
Clients were also instructed by the memo to deny that they ever saw warning labels on product packages. The memo was so detailed and comprehensive that Eugene Cook, a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, said at the time, "With this document, you could almost go down the street, get a homeless person, spend a couple of hours with him, and he would be prepared to testify."
Read more about this topic: Baron & Budd Asbestos Memo
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)