The Tort Lawyer and the BP Oil Disaster

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Like most men and a lot of women in South Louisiana, Becnel spent his youth hunting and fishing the wild lands around him and often ventured down into the saltwater estuary, the system most under siege by the oil spill, to spend a day trawling for shrimp. He echoes a refrain heard over and over—that it's not just an ecosystem under assault but a way of life. "This is making people physically sick," he says.

A short drive from his office is a 15-acre gated compound that holds his house, a guest house, pool, horse paddock, barns, vegetable gardens, and a hurricane bunker. At a table in the guest house, over a lunch of chicken-and-andouille gumbo prepared by his cook, Becnel talks about his attachment to his hometown and the influences that prompted him to become a tort lawyer. His ancestors were part of a wave of German migration to Louisiana's Mississippi coast starting in the 1720s. His father died in 1965 at the age of 57 from lung cancer after an adult lifetime as a smoker. His estate was a house valued at $14,000 with a $7,000 mortgage remaining on it. Becnel worked his way through Louisiana State University, earning a bachelor of science degree in 1966. During law school at Loyola, he took a job as a night dispatcher for the local sheriff's office. "That's where I learned not to sleep," he says.

When Becnel graduated from Loyola in 1969, he had few resources. He rented one quarter of a tiny cinder-block building from the local gas company within walking distance of the office he now owns and occupies. The space, he recalls, was so small that he had to crawl over the top of his desk to get in and out.

Becnel envisioned himself as a small-town lawyer handling wills and property transactions. One of his first clients was a young woman, on the cusp of her honeymoon, who wanted to get her car transferred to her soon-to-be husband's name. "It was a $3 fee, and at that point I was dying for that $3," he says. "I said, 'no charge.' But I told her: 'Look, one day you might have a good case, don't forget me.' "

She didn't. The woman, Paulette Trosclair, sought out Becnel when she was later injured in a horrific car accident. Her case went to trial in Jefferson Parish and netted Becnel his first million-dollar verdict. His career as a tort lawyer was born.

Becnel doesn't mind talking about how well he's done, how good he is at what he does, and whom he knows. He also likes to drop names. His office and home are decorated with photos of Becnel and Jimmy Carter, Becnel and Ronald Reagan, Becnel and Hillary Clinton, Becnel and John Kerry, among others.

He shows off several of the 17 Mercedes-Benzes that he owns, some of which he assigns to his staff to drive. "I have 12 tractors," he says, each one hooked to a separate implement that he uses to do yard work. The explanation is that he can't change implements because he donated a kidney several years ago to his brother, and rib-cage weakness prevents him from heavy lifting. It doesn't, however, prevent him from mowing his own grass from on top of a tractor or from working in his multi-acre vegetable garden, which he has rigged with night lights so that he can garden through bouts of insomnia. "Ten p.m. or 3 a.m., it doesn't matter. I could be out there," he says.

An inveterate tinkerer, Becnel completed a 3,000 square- foot hurricane bunker—made from structural steel and rod-trussed, concrete-filled cinderblocks—earlier this year, which he says will withstand 250 mile-per-hour winds and can hold several families. He has hooked it all up to a generator that he says "could run two city blocks," and he has 20,000 gallons of diesel in underground tanks to power it.

He has a 40,000-acre ranch near Aspen, Colo.—a fact he mentions more than once—and takes a visitor on a tour of his main house, where he shows off a bathroom and curved walk-through closet used by his wife, Mary Hotard Becnel, a local judge. The addition was completed several years ago and was designed by Bill Gates' architect, whom he knows from Aspen. Becnel says his other holdings include about 4,000 acres of land in and around Reserve where he keeps 500 chickens to supply fresh eggs for his compound and for friends.

Ironically, Marathon Oil (MRO) has a large refining operation in nearby Garyville that partly occupies property that Becnel says he sold the company. Earlier this month, an explosion ripped through a boiler there, causing injuries. So far around 200 plaintiffs have poured into Becnel's law office to sue.

"I'm probably one of the few people in the country who doesn't accept his Social Security," Becnel says. "I could retire, but I don't because I just love the work."

Becnel and the other spill lawyers may have a big job ahead of them if the Exxon Valdez litigation is a foreshadowing of the BP cases. Exxon fought the $5 billion Alaska state court damage verdict for 14 years, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the oil giant spent $3.4 billion to clean up 1,200 miles of Alaskan shoreline, and tens of millions more on legal fees, it eventually won a $4.5 billion reduction from the Supreme Court on the punitive damages. On the other hand, "this is a radically different fact pattern than Exxon Valdez," says Arsenault. While the Exxon Valdez disaster was blamed on a drunken ship captain, "the BP spill follows a very troubling pattern of systemic failures." Arsenault also doubts that our "judicial, legislative, and executive branches will allow a repeat" of the drawn-out Exxon Valdez case. So far, at least, BP is playing contrite corporate citizen, offering to help commercial fishermen with their bills and providing no hints about its legal defense strategies.

Becnel thinks that no matter how large the judgments finally are, BP will be able to shoulder the costs of a massive cleanup and the damage claims simply based on the value of its oil reserves. A parallel can be found in the case of U.S. tobacco companies, which continue to pay claims, estimated at more than $270 billion, out of future income. Salas, Becnel's partner in the litigation, says that he has another theory of how BP will finance the damages: "The American people will ultimately pay for it at the gas pump."

Wells is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

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