Van Beckwith and Michael Calhoon of Baker Botts defended Russian natural gas company Gazprom against a $1.37 billion trade secrets lawsuit brought by Texas oil company Moncrief Oil. During cross-examination, Beckwith discovered that a key exhibit Moncrief presented had been altered with information from years after the claimed creation date, forcing Moncrief to abandon its claims. Though the jury initially seemed biased against Russia, Beckwith and Calhoon were able to show that Moncrief's deal with Gazprom never actually existed and its proposal was not a trade secret, leading to victory before the case went to the jury.

1. Litigators of the Week:
Van Beckwith and
Michael Calhoon of Baker Botts
Reprinted with permission from the AmLaw LITIGATION Daily featured on February 5, 2015 © 2015 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved.
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David Bario, The Litigation Daily
February 5, 2015
When trial kicked off last month in a $1.37 billion trade secrets case
against Russian natural gas giant OAO Gazprom, Baker Botts partners Van
Beckwith and Michael Calhoon knew they faced a stiff challenge.
Moncrief Oil International, an 80-year-old Texas company with deep
roots in Fort Worth, claimed that Gazprom used stolen data and strong-
arm tactics to sideline the company from a venture with Occidental
Petroleum to sell Russian liquefied natural gas in the U.S. The job that
fell to Beckwith and Calhoon—at a time when Russia was busy rebuilding
its reputation as a global villain—was to persuade a jury in Moncrief's
hometown that the company's narrative was bogus, and that its evidence
against Gazprom was too.
What Beckwith and Calhoon didn't know was that their opponent was
going to help them do it.
Moncrief's case imploded spectacularly this week, after Beckwith used a
cross-examination of Moncrief's CFO to show that a key exhibit allegedly
drafted in 2004 had been cobbled together at least partly in 2012. The
executive's apparent fakery forced Moncrief to abandon its claims four
weeks into the trial.
On Monday, after the judge formally tossed the case and Moncrief
agreed not to sue Gazprom again, we recounted the unlikely chain of
events that brought the trial to its abrupt end. It began when Beckwith
and an associate noticed that a graphic marked "figure 11" in Moncrief's
exhibit came without corresponding figures 1 through 10. From there, a
Google search was all it took to show that the image was plucked from a
university research paper—eight years after Moncrief supposedly created
the document in pursuit of its natural gas deal.
It was "a Perry Mason moment," as Beckwith later told Bloomberg.
But even without the document drama, the Baker Botts lawyers said in
an interview on Thursday, posttrial debriefs with jurors suggested that
Moncrief's case was going nowhere. "From speaking with the jurors, we got
a pretty strong idea that we were winning," Calhoon said.
The juror feedback was especially gratifying after an unnerving three full
days of voir dire that preceded the trial, Calhoon said. Prospective jurors
praised the Moncrief family for "making Fort Worth the city it is today,"
he recalled. When asked about Russia, Beckwith said, jury candidates
described hiding under their desks during childhood nuclear aid raid drills,
and said Russians couldn't be trusted.
The unfolding crisis in Ukraine didn't help. And neither did some of
Moncrief's harshest allegations. Moncrief claimed it obtained an interest
in a major Siberian natural gas field in a deal with a Gazprom subsidiary,
and that it planned to send Russian gas flowing into the U.S. in partnership
with Occidental. Moncrief had witness testimony suggesting that Gazprom
used an ex-KGB agent to intimidate Occidental into striking a gas import
venture directly with Gazprom, partly by threatening Occidental's assets
in Russia.
The trouble with Moncrief's case, Beckwith countered during the trial,
is that it was premised on a purported deal that never existed. And while
Moncrief claimed that Gazprom used its trade secrets to partner with
Occidental, Beckwith said the company couldn't prove that its natural gas
import proposal was either secret or stolen.
Moncrief's pitch was just one in a sea of proposals around that time to
import Russian liquid natural gas and regassify it in the U.S., Beckwith
said in his opening statement. But thanks largely to the U.S. shale boom, a
whole slew of LNG deals never got off the ground.
"This wasn't a trade secret. It was a sales pitch, and it was a bad one for
Gazprom," Beckwith told jurors.
In the end, the oil companies never built the Texas LNG terminal
envisioned by Moncrief's proposal. "The site was dirt in '04, and it's dirt in
'15," Beckwith told us this week. And thanks to the defense team's keen
instincts, Gazprom won its case before the Fort Worth jury had to decide
between a hometown David and a Russian Goliath.
Van Beckwith and Mike Calhoon