“This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper,” concludes T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men. It is, of course, a “gimme” — to make world-ending predictions because no one will be around to say whether you got it right.
For the record, for the end of the world, I am betting bang. But, as civil litigators know, civil litigation, on the other hand, is all about ending in whimpers.
For real life litigators, there are very few bangs and billions of whimpers (often quiet whimpers, confidential and under seal). (Even the supposed “bangs,” incidentally, judgments or jury verdicts, often have long whimpering tails of appeals, post judgment enforcement efforts and so on.)
This is all prologue for the news that it is time to say good-bye to Cenveo v. Southern Graphics Systems, a case that Minnesota Litigator has followed for some time with interest. The case settled this week.
Now it is time for the clients to tally up how much the litigation cost them and to figure out whether it was worth it to nab those employees and their precious business from Cenveo in the first place or, on the other side, whether it was worth it to Cenveo to seek redress from SGS for Cenveo’s lost “human capital.”
At a minimum, some appear to have learned a good (though expensive) lesson about the preservation of evidence.