Baron & Budd’s Previous Experience with Oil Companies

The companies responsible for the Gulf Coast oil spill—BP, Transocean and Halliburton—are large, powerful companies. Fighting a company of the size and wealth of a Halliburton or BP takes tremendous resources in time, experience and money. Baron & Budd has gone up against BP and Halliburton before. We’ve taken on big oil and uncovered some of the secrets that the oil industry didn’t want regulators or the public to know. A recent article in the National Law Journal recognized that Baron & Budd is one of the major firms to have held the oil industry accountable for past misconduct, and we’re ready to do it again.

BP

In the national MTBE litigation against the nation’s major oil refiners, our attorneys put together the liability case against BP/Amoco, sifting through the company documents and deposing key personnel to prove exactly what the company did to protect its own financial interests and to keep environmental risks concealed—which sounds a lot like what BP did in this situation as well. In the MTBE litigation, Baron & Budd uncovered evidence that showed:

• BP knew that a component of its gasoline would leak from underground storage tanks and then contaminate nearby groundwater.
• BP purposefully kept this information from regulators to conceal the true extent of the MTBE water contamination problem.
• BP engaged in a single-minded strategy to convince regulators to relax the cleanup standards instead of dealing with the contamination problem.

Halliburton

When a Halliburton subsidiary filed for bankruptcy reorganization, Baron & Budd stepped in to protect the rights of the company’s asbestos victims. Russell Budd, the firm’s managing shareholder, negotiated with Halliburton and became the chief architect in establishing a trust fund that would protect present and future asbestos victims throughout the United States. The agreement reached between Halliburton and Baron & Budd created the largest asbestos trust fund of its kind anywhere in the world.

Our attorneys know how these companies operate. We know how to put together a solid case and how to negotiate effectively with these companies. These companies will continue to point the finger at each other as long as they can, but we have the experience it will take to uncover the truth about the oil spill and hold the responsible parties accountable.