Judge’s Recusal Isn’t Needed After Ex-Firm’s Deepwater Cases

A US judge did not need to recuse himself from cases over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill despite his former law firm’s previous work on the case, a US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit panel ruled.

The New Orleans-based appeals court on Friday affirmed the decision by US District Judge Barry Ashe of the Eastern District of Louisiana to not step away from the cases. The appellate panel said there was “no evidence” that Ashe previously worked on the litigation when New Orleans law firm Stone Pigman represented a decade earlier Cameron International, the manufacturer of a blowout preventer that failed ahead of the oil spill.

Attorneys for the parties in the case didn’t immediately have comment, or respond to requests for comment. An employee in Ashe’s chambers said the judge didn’t have any comment.

The appeals court on Friday said that while Cameron International was “directly adverse” to the plaintiffs in a 2013 liability trial, it is not involved in the ongoing litigation. It also said that Ashe’s longtime partnership at the law firm was well known, but that the parties did not move to disqualify him from the cases until he rejected the inclusion of an expert report in the litigation.

The Fifth Circuit said eight other district judges reached the same conclusion on excluding the expert report as Ashe. “If Judge Ashe erred when he failed to recuse in these cases, that error was harmless,” the court said.

“Nonetheless, as the arguments on this appeal support, potential conflicts of interest must be taken seriously by every member of the judiciary,” the court wrote. “The litigants and the public need to be confident in the impartiality of those who will decide legal disputes. This appeal is fair warning to each of us of the importance of assuring the reality and appearance of that impartiality.”

Chief Judge Priscilla Richman and Judge Andrew Oldham joined the unanimous opinion written by Judge Leslie Southwick.

Corey Darnell Street, Et Al., versus BP Exploration & Production, Incorporated; BP America Production Company; BP, P.L.C.; Transocean Holdings, L.L.C.; Transocean Deepwater, Incorporated; Transocean Offshore Deepwater Drilling, Incorporated; Halliburton Energy Services, Incorporated, 5th Cir., No. 22-30393, 10/20/23