• January 13, 2012

In July of 2008, a complaint was brought against several companies by a whistle-blower under the Federal False Claims Act, alleging that hard disk manufacturers were falsely representing their products sold to the U.S. government as made in the U.S.A. when, in fact, they were made overseas.

For reasons unknown to Minnesota Litigator, here we are over three years later and the defendants are just now responding to the (since amended) complaint (with motions to dismiss).  

According to one of the many defendants, the plaintiff United States of America, has no idea who sold foreign hard-drives as U.S. made and the lawsuit is therefore “incredible” (see their brief, at footnote 2).

Also, the lawsuit, according to this defendant, is a copy-cat of an earlier lawsuit and is therefore barred under the “piling on doctrine,” more commonly known as the “first filed rule.”

If the plaintiff United States is mistaken in this lawsuit and there were no such “false” sales of foreign-made hard-drives, the government will nevertheless cause a redistribution of a large sum of money to at least some U.S. tax-payers — the flotilla of legal professionals hired by defendants, which, all told, include probably one hundred or more, many with bills in the millions (not to speak of plaintiff’s counsel, unnamed third-parties, etc., etc.).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *