Morelli Ratner PC works with a wide variety of cases, but our primary focus is on:
When there are large numbers of claims associated with a single product, they may be part of a mass tort. It basically means that an act of negligence on the part of an individual or company resulted in injuring many people. Many factors are considered when deciding if a claim should be part of a mass tort.
An employee leaves Cisco and launches an antitrust lawsuit against the company over its alleged anticompetitive and illegal tactics. Cisco responds by using its influence to get the whistleblower arrested in Canada and embroiled in unnecessary extradition proceedings for a year, all on trumped-up charges. You might call such behavior a mind-boggling abuse of corporate power. Cisco calls this a defense litigation strategy.
According to an article published yesterday on ArsTechnica, Cisco had antitrust plaintiff and former employee Peter Adekeye arrested in Canada and deemed a flight risk in order to put pressure on Adekeye to drop his lawsuit against the company. Despite not being accused of any violent crimes and despite having a “blemish-free record and a sterling resume,” Adekeye was jailed for almost a month and then compelled for a period to “surrender his passport and remain in Vancouver unless given permission to travel elsewhere in Canada.”
As Ian Mulgrew details in his article, the bogus criminal case against Adekeye put him under tremendous pressure at a critical period of time in the litigation against Cisco. Adekeye posed a problem to Cisco, so the company appears to have done its best to shunt him aside, with the cooperation of some U.S. federal prosecutors.
At the heart of the criminal complaint was a somewhat dubious civil tort claim against Adekeye for a relatively small amount of money, a countersuit to Adekeye’s original antitrust lawsuit.
This countersuit itself is a good example of the manner in which, while decrying “frivolous lawsuits,” corporate America continues to produce vast quantities of strategic litigation designed to bleed competitors of money.
These lawsuits are frivolous, unlike most legitimate tort claims in which individuals who have been injured in some way try to recoup the expenses associated with their injury.
Once the Canadian judge overseeing the extradition realized what was going on, he refused the extradition request and chastised Cisco and the U.S. attorneys involved for their participation in the affair. As Mulgrew writes, Judge McKinnon thinks that
The entire incident…was a planned and deliberate act by Cisco with the collusion of the US prosecutors to transform a minor civil complaint into a criminal charge requiring 500 years imprisonment. All the US had to do was let Adekeye into the country, Justice McKinnon said, but instead astoundingly misled Canada into launching expensive legal proceedings.
Fortunately, Adekeye was successful in forcing Cisco to abandon its allegedly illegal business practices.
Both parties in this struggle were attempting in different ways to make it too expensive for the other side to continue. The difference is that Adekeye appears to have had a legitimate grievance, while Cisco had only trifling complaints about Adekeye. And where Adekeye attempted to use the legal system properly, Cisco resorted to using its power to have Adekey wrongly imprisoned.
This incident demonstrates the challenges that plaintiffs can face whenever they go up against large multinational corporations – whether the plaintiff in question is a whistleblower, a victim of discrimination or harassment, or someone who has been otherwise injured by the company’s actions or products.
-Benedict P. Morelli and David S. Ratner
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