Toyota won it's case

A former lawyer for Toyota who accused the carmaker of hiding damaging information about its vehicles has been ordered to pay Toyota $2.6 million.

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An arbitrator determined that the former lawyer, Dimitrios Biller, had violated a confidentiality agreement he had with the company. Mr. Biller was managing counsel in charge of rollover cases at Toyota from 2003 to 2007.

The ruling, which was entirely in Toyota’s favor, does not expressly dismiss Mr. Biller’s accusations, but Toyota held it up as vindication.

“Throughout this process, Mr. Biller has continuously made misleading and inaccurate allegations about Toyota’s conduct, and we feel this award is an appropriate consequence of his actions and completely discredits his meritless attacks on our company and our people,” Christopher P. Reynolds, group vice president and general counsel for Toyota Motor Sales, said in a statement.

Mr. Biller sued Toyota in July 2009, maintaining that company officials had conspired to destroy evidence related to more than 300 lawsuits regarding sport utility vehicles that rolled over. He accused Toyota of wrongful termination, emotional distress and racketeering, saying the company frequently failed to turn over electronically stored documents with information about vehicles’ design, engineering and testing.

Toyota denied the accusations and described Mr. Biller, who received $3.7 million in severance payments, as a disgruntled former employee.

Mr. Biller could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

The arbitrator, Gary L. Taylor, a retired judge, rejected the racketeering claims and found Mr. Biller liable for breach of contract. Mr. Biller was ordered to return documents to Toyota that he had taken and to pay $2.5 million in damages for the unauthorized disclosures and $100,000 in punitive damages.

Mr. Biller provided thousands of documents to a Texas lawyer seeking to reopen 17 lawsuits involving vehicle rollovers, but the lawyer ended his effort after reviewing the contents of the documents. Mr. Biller provided the documents “without a request, subpoena or legal compulsion,” and the damage inflicted upon Toyota by his disclosures “is real and it is extensive,” the ruling said.

The arbitrator allowed Toyota to disclose his ruling, given the harmful nature of the information that Mr. Biller had made public.

Toyota revealed the decision two weeks after it criticized one of its dealers for disclosing a $10 million settlement between the carmaker and relatives of family members who died in August 2009 when the Lexus they were driving crashed after its accelerator pedal became stuck.

The crash was one factor that led to Toyota’s recall of about eight million vehicles globally to resolve complaints about sudden acceleration in late 2009 and early 2010.

New York Times