April 11, 2005

"I was feeding a lot of information to European and U.S. papers. ... It was part of my strategy to affect the stock price, which I was very successful at." -- plaintiff's lawyer Mikal Watts on his tactics in the Baycol product liability litigation against the Bayer company of Germany, as quoted by reporter Monica Langley in the May 3, 2004 WSJ. See, on "trial by press" more generally, a new article by Steven Hantler, Victor Schwartz and Phil Goldberg on "litigation communications", which they argue courts should recognize as enough of an organic extension of lawyers' functions to merit attorney-client privilege; the article is reprinted (PDF) by American Justice Partnership.