Here is a further article on a $ 19 Million settlement in a Japanese American anti-dumping case arising from discovery mistakes by Perkins Coie.

"Perkins Coie reached a multimillion-dollar settlement last month with former client Tokyo Kikai Seisakusho, a manufacturer of large newspaper printing presses. The Japanese company sued two of the firm’s Washington-based partners for malpractice in February 2006 stemming from work they did in a legal dispute involving anti-dumping laws.

TKS agreed to drop its suit against the Seattle-based firm on Aug. 22. Days before the settlement documents were filed, the company announced in a press release that it would receive $19 million to settle a malpractice suit arising from an anti-dumping case. It did not name the law firm in the release, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

"By the time the case went to trial in November 2003, the parties had exchanged more than a million pages of documents, taken scores of depositions on two continents, and translated thousands of communications from Japanese to English.

But in its malpractice complaint, TKS says there was one document in particular that proved critical to the case: In 1996, the company sold two printing presses to The Dallas Morning News with a disguised rebate. TKS and the News originally agreed on a price of $5.2 million for the two presses — the same price TKS had charged the News two years earlier in a similar deal that the Commerce Department later determined to have violated anti-dumping laws. With that in mind, TKS says in its complaint that Perkins’ Saito advised the company to raise the price on the new presses by $2.2 million to avoid another government review. In conjunction with the price increase, though, Saito built a hidden rebate for the News into the deal through a combination of cancelled fees and free supplies that would reduce the paper’s cost back to the 1994 price tag. TKS followed Saito’s advice.

A SECRET REBATE REVEALED

And that’s when Goss got lucky. During discovery, TKS claims that Perkins Coie made the costly error of sending Goss’ attorneys privileged documents outlining the printing press transaction with the News. According to the complaint, those documents also showed that Saito advised TKS to destroy any evidence of the true cost of the presses sold to the News.

But Nicholas Critelli, name partner of Nicholas Critelli Associates, who was local counsel for TKS in the Goss trial, says it was unclear that handing over the documents was inadvertent or, in hindsight, a poor tactical decision. "