PLCAO Online Forums

November 19, 2009

Thanks to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the burden of litigation on Dole Food Company stemming from its international pesticide use keeps getting lighter. On Monday, Dole announced that a state judge in Los Angeles had dismissed seven more cases concerning claims of sterility by Dole banana farmers allegedly exposed to DBCP (dibromochloropropane) on the company's plantations. The decisions last week by Los Angeles superior court judge Ann Jones wiped out the last remaining DBCP claims facing Dole from more than 650 Dole workers in the Ivory Coast.Gibson Dunn scored its first major coup for Dole in April, when Judge Jones's predecessor handling the DBCP docket, Judge Victoria Chaney, tossed the leading torts cases facing the company over its use of the pesticide in Nicaragua. As we wrote then, Judge Chaney accused the plaintiffs lawyers behind those cases of trying to pull off a massive fraud against Dole and other defendants, including by rounding up and coaching Nicaraguan plaintiffs who had never worked for Dole and were not sterile. That decision was followed in October by a federal district court judge in Miami's refusal to enforce a $98 million Nicaraguan judgment against Dole, partly based on the evidence of fraud and corruption that Gibson Dunn uncovered.