A team at Steptoe secured a $ 171.6 million judgment for client Eddystone Rail Company LLC against propane company Ferrellgas Partners and certain of its affiliates. After a 19-day bench trial handled in spurts dating back to September 2022, U.S. District Judge Joshua Wolson in Philadelphia found in a decision unsealed last week that Eddystone was damaged by a series of fraudulent transfers surrounding Ferrellgas’ sale of Bridger Transfer Services, or BTS (which the judge had a heyday with in his introduction!). Eddystone built its rail-to-barge facility in Eddystone, Pennsylvania, to serve BTS by unloading traincars full of crude petroleum from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota for further transport or storage. The Steptoe team included partners Steve Barber, Jennifer Quinn-Barabanov and Alice Loughran, attorney Fil Agusti, of counsel Linda Bailey and Andrew Sloniewsky, and associates Caitlin Daday, Kate Fisch, Emma Marshak and Joe McClure.
Kathleen Sullivan, Dylan Proctor and Scott Watson of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan got a major appellate win for TRC in a dispute where the oil producer previously won a $120 million verdict against Chevron. California’s Fifth District Court of Appeal last week reversed a lower court decision granting Chevron a new trial based on a single juror’s misconduct. In the first published opinion since 1950 where a California court has reversed a grant of a new trial for juror misconduct in a civil case, the court found there was no prejudice to Chevron by the juror’s failure to disclose either a 40-year-old criminal conviction or his status as a party to a personal injury lawsuit nearly a decade before his jury service.
