Diaz et al. v. Tesla, Inc. et al

CASE NAME: Diaz et al. v. Tesla, Inc. et al.

TYPE OF CASE: Civil rights violations

COURT: U.S. Northern District

JUDGE(S): Senior District Judge William H. Orrick III

DEFENSE LAWYERS: Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, Alexander B. Spiro, Asher B. Griffin, Daniel C. Posner, Mari F. Henderson, Michael T. Lifrak, Alex Bergjans, Michael J. Sebring, Stephanie Kelemen, Yusef Al-Jarani, Aubrey L. Jones

PLAINTIFF LAWYERS: Alexander Morrison & Fehr LLP, J. Bernard Alexander III; California Civil Rights Law Group, Lawrence A. Organ, Cimone A. Nunley; Altshuler Berzon LLP, Michael Rubin; Collier Law Firm LLP, Dustin L. Collier

When Tesla, Inc. faced a $137 million damages award entered against it by a federal jury in the largest single-plaintiff race discrimination verdict in U.S. history, the automaker turned to Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP. Another defense firm had handled the trial; now it was up to Alex B. Spiro, Kathleen M. Sullivan, Asher B. Griffin and their team to take over Tesla's defense and challenge the big-dollar outcome.

DANIEL C. POSNER

The Quinn Emanuel team successfully argued that the sum was excessive; the trial judge reduced it to $15 million. When plaintiff Owen Diaz declined to accept that amount, the team retried the damages case and emerged with a $3.175 million jury verdict -- a 98% reduction from the first jury's award.

"We have a lot of corporate cases with numbers north of a billion dollars, but for single plaintiff case this was astronomical," Sullivan, a former Stanford Law School dean and the founding chair of Quinn Emanuel's national appellate practice, said of the original $137 million verdict. She filed the successful post-trial motions.

"We persuaded the trial judge that the first award was an excessive outlier both on the emotional distress figure, for which there was no medical evidence, and on the constitutional ground that punitives have to bear a proportional ratio to compensatory damages much lower than18-to-one as we had here."

At the damages retrial, Spiro and Griffin convinced the new jury that even if the plaintiff had suffered some emotional distress, it merited only $175,000 in compensatory damages plus $3 million in punitives.

Spiro said even the reduced punitives number is excessive, and both sides have filed appeals. "It was a troubling case. I have spent a great part of my career trying to do a lot for civil rights. It was hard to go into this one with its upsetting subject matter knowing something did not go right at the first trial. Our defense was complex and nuanced, but it came down to whether the plaintiff gilded the lily. This jury got it right."

MARI F. HENDERSON

The lead plaintiff lawyer, J. Bernard Alexander, emailed, "Two separate juries determined that Mr. Diaz 'endur[ed] a racist and hostile work environment while employed at defendant Tesla, Inc.'s factory in Fremont.' That defense counsel's tactics achieved a decrease in the monetary value of the adverse judgment did not erase the stain of discrimination. It appears that focusing on the monetary reduction acts as a blinder to seeing the actual injustice."

--John Roemer