In a scathing rebuke of the coordinated climate litigation campaign’s copy-and-paste filing tactics, a federal judge in Puerto Rico has called the integrity of the lawyers involved into question. [emphasis, links added]
A recent order from U.S. District Judge Aida M. Delgado-Colón lambasted the outside counsel representing San Juan, Puerto Rico, in its climate lawsuit against oil companies filed in 2023.
The rebuke, which was accompanied by a proposed $7,000 fine, was twofold: 1) for missing court-imposed deadlines, and 2) more grievously, for plagiarizing a complaint filed by forty Puerto Rican municipalities in 2022.
Let’s dive in.
Judge: “Carbon Copy” Lawsuit Should Serve As A “Cautionary Tale For All Members Of The Bar”
San Juan’s complaint “is almost a word-for-word carbon copy” of the Puerto Rico municipalities’ case, which was filed a year earlier.
Judge Delgado-Colón accused David Efron, a local personal-injury attorney representing the capital city, of leaving in details (and even typos) specific to the municipalities’ class action:
“Here, Attorney Efron lifted not only the entire theory of San Juan’s case from the Municipalities’ Case but went so far as to use virtually the very same words and ideas, usurping the thought processes and legal theories a client hires an attorney to develop and perform.
“[T]his conduct runs afoul not only of Attorney Efron’s duty of competence to his client, but also his duty of candor to the court.” [Emphasis Added]
Judge Delgado-Colón added that Efron’s plagiarism of the Municipalities’ case constitutes a serious violation of his responsibilities as an attorney:
“Taking another attorney’s work product without attribution, adopting it wholesale as the foundation of your client’s case, and subsequently submitting plagiarized briefs certainly would attorney’s Rule 11(b) certification into serious doubt.” [Emphasis added]
The order also noted that Efron had missed deadlines to file motions in the case. As an explanation, Efron said he was on trial in another case.
While the judge gave Efron 15 days to explain why he shouldn’t be sanctioned $7,000, Judge Delgado-Colón stated that the Court would soon be issuing “a separate order” to address the “matter of plagiarism” because “a monetary sanction on its own would be insufficient to address the seriousness of the circumstances.”
Not The First Time Climate Litigators Copy and Paste a Lawsuit
Plaintiffs position these legal crusades as a means of “surviving climate change.” But climate lawsuits won’t reduce emissions or lead to improved industry standards – what they will do is stuff the coffers of trial lawyers.
The reality is that these cases are pushed by activists and academics who want to bankrupt the industry and brought forward by trial lawyers looking for a payday.
And though the overt plagiarism in San Juan may be the most egregious, it’s far from the first instance where lawyers pursuing climate litigation have submitted near-identical versions of earlier cases.
In fact, when the District of Columbia and Minnesota filed their lawsuits back in 2020, EID Climate pointed out that they used identical language despite the fact that they were filed by different jurisdictions.
On top of this, Washington, D.C. filed its lawsuit less than 24 hours prior to Minnesota, and at the time, the jurisdictions were not represented by the same outside counsel.
When Massachusetts filed its lawsuit in 2019, it copied and pasted portions of New York’s lawsuit.
And in Rhode Island, energy company defendants have even mounted a Rule 11 challenge to the state’s lawsuit, stating that its law firm, Sher Edling (which is currently under congressional investigation), used language pulled directly from similar suits in other states.
Bottom line: The order serves as a warning to potential filers that simply copying and pasting other climate complaints in the hope of a payday is an unacceptable practice.
Given that all these lawsuits boil down to the same flawed legal strategies, Judge Delgado-Colón just poked a major hole in the entire billionaire-backed climate litigation campaign.
Top image generated by DALL·E by OpenAI
Read more at EID Climate
