The Kansas City Lawyers respond to State Farm’s disqualification motion in the Rigsby qui tam suit
So. Guess how many times the memorandum and response mention Dickie Scruggs’s name? It doesn’t. It does say this: “No member of GBM was ever associated with or ever performed work for the Scruggs Katrina Group”.
The response tries to glide around the payments to the Rigsbys, noting that no member of Graves’s firm ratified the payments, that they knew about them but thought it was (ahem) a legitimate consulting arrangement.
It also glides over the fact that quite clearly Dickie Scruggs (who was making the illegal payments) brought the Kansas City lawyers into the case and introduced them to the Rigsbys. That fact is not even mentioned in the memorandum and response, although the Dewitt Affidavit on disqualification does acknowledge that Scruggs brought all of these folks into the case.
The response is even weirder than the brief. The response says that the Rigsbys were not paid as fact witnesses in this case, because they are parties in this case, and paying parties is really bad and totally against the rules. The qui tam lawyers were not doing that, the response says– the Rigsbys were paid as fact witnesses by SKG in another case altogther.
Excuse me? Dickie Scruggs was paying the Rigsbys starting in July 2006, a few months after the qui tam suit was filed. This response is apparently premised on the notion that the Rigsbys could put money from Scruggs into their pockets thinking “we are fact witnesses” and totally negate the fact that they were also clients. Sort of like Dorothy whispering “There’s no place like home” and she’s magically no longer in Oz.
And are they really serious that the Rigsbys won’t be fact witnesses in their own case? I don’t think so.
FOLO
4/28/8
Magnolia Tribune
