Watts Guerra Faces Trial Over Alleged Contract With Marketer

摘要

Prominent plaintiffs’ lawyer Mikal Watts, a Minnesota attorney, and their two law firms must proceed toward trial on claims that they failed to pay a marketer more than $3 million forpublicizing seed litigation to farmers under an oral contract, a federal court in South Dakota ruled.Punitive damages are also on the table for now, Judge Charles B. Kornmann said Thursday for the U.S. District Court for the District of South Dakota.Farmers in the underlying mass tort litigation alleged they lost income on their corn crops. They said Syngenta AG and its Minnesota-based subsidiary hadn’t gotten approval from theChinese government to sell corn grown from the genetically modified seed the U.S. farmers were using. Prices allegedly dropped as a result.