Attorneys for Barbour Griffith & Rogers lobbed more accusations at Winston & Strawn in documents filed in D.C. federal court yesterday over whether the Chicago-based firm leaked sealed court documents to two reporters. (Note Legal Times' previous coverage about the lawsuit between IPOC International Growth Fund, an offshore business, which accuses Diligence — working for Barbour Griffith and its client, Alfa Bank — of impersonating intelligence agents to illegally obtain information on an IPOC audit.)
The latest string of finger-pointing has (perhaps unsurprisingly) come down to semantics, but in Washington parsing words is often the juiciest part of the fight (think, ehem, Monica?). The noteworthy phrase, Barbour Griffith's attorneys wrote, is that Winston & Strawn says it did not disclose sealed documents "in this case."
There are, however, other cases related to the alleged impersonation with similar documents under seal. Barbour Griffith's filing yesterday cites one particular case between KPMG and Diligence, Barbour Griffith's subcontractor, in which Winston & Strawn tried and failed to get the very documents in question unsealed. That, Barbour Griffith wrote, would make IPOC and its attorney responsible for keeping the information secret in any other case. (Diligence settled that case for an undisclosed sum.) "This is a classic 'non-denial denial,'" the lobby shop's attorneys wrote.
So what is the lobby shop hoping for? Putting Winston & Strawn partner W. Gordon Dobie under oath.
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