Super Lawyers - Pennsylvania and Delaware 2017

Writ Large
On June 6, 1989, FBi agents raided rocky Flats
Plant, a nuclear weapons facility 40 minutes
northwest of Denver, in Jefferson County, Colorado,
based on allegations of unsafe operating condi-
tions and environmental contamination.

the following January, homeowners near the
plant filed complaints—against the Dow Chemical
Co., which operated the facility from 1952 to 1975,
and rockwell international Corp., which ran it from

1975 until 1989—under the Price-anderson act, a federal law governing nuclear liability issues, and the common law of Colorado relating to trespass and nuisance.

“enough plutonium was left on the plant property that the pollution continued to waft into the neighborhood and, frankly, in our view, continues to waft into the neighborhood today,” says Merrill Davidoff, who served as lead counsel in Cook v.

Rockwell International Corp. “Plutonium has a half-
life of 24,000 years.”
Davidoff’s firm, Berger & Montague, was
brought on in late 1989 to aid local counsel, thanks
to its rep in environmental class action cases. Little
did Davidoff know he would be working on the
case for nearly three decades.

“i think Judge John Kane has observed that the court file in Colorado is the largest court file in the history of that court,” he says. “i mean, there were just repeated motions—hundreds and hundreds of repetitive motions over the same

Merrill G. Davidoff

BERGER & MONTAGUE ANTITRUST LITIGATION PHILADELPHIA

David F. Sorensen

BERGER & MONTAGUE ANTITRUST LITIGATION PHILADELPHIA

The Twenty-Seven Years’ War

Two Berger & Montague attorneys on Rocky Flats, one of the longest cases
in U.S. history By anDre W BranDt
thing, again and again and again.”
the class was certified in October 1993 and the
case moved slowly from the start. Between 1993 and
2005, Davidoff’s team and the defense participated
in a marathon of discovery and pre-trial maneuver-
ing. in 1995, after a week-long bench trial against the
Department of energy, Judge Kane held the DOe in
contempt for “stonewalling the discovery,” Davidoff
says, calling it “a scorched-earth defense.

“[they had] an extremely tough litigation style,
and they were backed by the DOe in legal fees and
costs,” he adds. “it was a very hard-fought case, and
feelings get stirred up in that kind of a situation.”
in October 2005, the trial finally began at the
U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. it
lasted four months and involved 41 witnesses, over
600 exhibits and five class representatives for
approximately 13,000 class members who owned
property in the area on June 7, 1989.

“Many of our experts were just concerned sci-
entists,” says Davidoff. “they were paid, obviously,
but these were people who testified because they
were concerned about what went on at rocky
Flats and the way the government had treated the
neighbors of the plant.”
David Sorensen, a managing shareholder at
Berger & Montague who was Davidoff’s co-counsel
on the case, still remembers the closing argument.
“after the defendants responded, Merrill gave a
closing rebuttal, which i thought was just phenom-