Services to Private Clients
1953-200- I have had some fun over the years in representing individual clients, beginning with those I represented at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. I have recorded many of my experiences between 1953 and 1978 (when I became a dean) in Experience, the magazine published for the Senior Divison of the American Bar Association. I had earlier published the same accounts in Alibi, the Duke Law student literary magazine. Clients I Remember. By far the most important deed I ever performed as a lawyer is recorded (as usual with disguised names) in Two Letters to Judge Eaton (the real recipient) which was published in the Judges’ Journal, a publication of the judges’ division of the ABA, Two Letters to Judge Eaton.
Since being in North Carolina, what little work of this sort I have done has mostly been consulting with lawyers who were representing impecunious clients. Most came to me because of my expressed interest in the problem of standard form contracts. One who paid me was the National Automobile Dealers Association. I wrote a memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee for them and, sure enough, they secured enactment of a law exempting them from the Federal Arbitration Act.
In the 1980s, I represented Filipino sugar growers on the island of Negros who sought compensation for losses they had experienced at the hands of the government of Ferdinand Marcos, or more specifically his guy Roberto Benedicto. I acquired the mission from a president of the Philippine Bar Association who was from Negros and who cameto Duke to visit his friend Roberto Soberano. Benedicto had been buying their sugar harvest for years at a price he was authorized to fix by law. He had tried to organize a price fixing conspiracy similar to that of OPEC, but it had failed, but there were American, British, and Japanese partners in the venture who had profited at the expense of the landowners. The Philippine Sugar Regulatory Commission flew me out to Manila for a conference, and then to Bagalod on Negros, where I organized a class action. I succeeded in getting Paul Hastings to represent the class on some of its claims, and Cadwalader Wickersham to represent the class on other matters. Both agreed to serve on contingent fee bases. We hired a dectective and located substantial assets of Benedicto. But the Philippine government had a Good Government Commission headed by Senator Salonga, and they were seeking to recover Marcos assets. They would not agree that the landowners could keep any assets we recovered. Under the circumstances, our law firms rightly declined to proceed. Alas, the law school was to receive one percent of the gross that might have reached several billion.
I have also assisted several North Carolina lawyers representing indigent clients contesting mandatory arbitration clauses, and also the Office of the North Carolina Attorney General in a similar matter. And in 2005, with the help of my student, Paul Castle, I filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court of Mississippi on behalf of poultry growers and numerous other organizations challenging the use of mandatory arbitration clauses to prevent aggregation of their claims in class actions.
In 2005, I was recruited by Jack McGehee of Houston to help him represent 700 Bangladeshi families whose properties were severely damaged or destroyed by gas well blowouts. The wells were the work of diverse firms, all of whom would prefer to litigate outside the United States. But there are connections to Texas and the Bangladesh courts are not, in my view, suitable alternative forums, for numerous reasons. We are in a sense reliving the famous Bhopal disaster of 1984, albeit on a more modest scale. The district judge in Harris County has granted a motion to dismiss on the ground that Texas is not a convenient forum. This notwithstanding the reality that the case is unlikely ever to be decided in Bangladesh.