TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA -- The Toyota Motor Company on Wednesday announced that it won a $2.6 million arbitration judgment involving its former in-house attorney Dimitrios Biller, who had accused the motor company of hiding evidence in product safety litigation.Biller - who received severance payments of $3.7 million - worked for Toyota for four years, time in which he was in charge of the company's rollover cases until 2007. In 2009, he filed suit against the motor company, arguing that Toyota had conspired to destroy evidence linked to several hundred lawsuits regarding rollover issues.
However, the arbitrator, Gary L. Taylor, found Biller liable for breach of contract, conversion and statutory unauthorized computer access for taking thousands of company documents when he left the company and releasing some of them publicly.
Furthermore, Taylor ordered Biller to pay $2.5 million in damages to Toyota, upholding the liquidated damages provision of $250,000 for each of 10 unauthorized disclosures. In addition, he was ordered to pay $100,000 in punitive damages.
Taylor said that "evidence showed multiple instances of unauthorized disclosure" of the company’s confidential information, citing Biller’s website, his public seminars, his discussions with the media and his decision to send "thousands of documents" to a Texas court "without a request, subpoena or legal compulsion."
"We believe that the Arbitrator’s award clearly vindicates Toyota’s position and reaffirms the critical importance of attorney-client privilege as a cornerstone of our legal system," said Christopher P. Reynolds, Group Vice President and General Counsel, Toyota Motor Sales, Inc.
"Throughout this process, Mr. Biller has continuously made misleading and inaccurate allegations about Toyota’s conduct, and we feel this award is an appropriate consequence of his actions and completely discredits his meritless attacks on our company and our people," Reynolds added.
Taylor also ordered Biller to return the confidential documents back to Toyota, prohibiting him from making future disclosures of the company's confidential information.
