Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Settlement negotiations - Toyota's "Secret Sauce" vs. Betsy's "Let it all hang out"

What's in the secret sauce?
It may look yummy, but secrets are poison by definition.

Now I presume that Kevin Minnick of Toyota's defense firm Skadden, Arps and presumably also his bosses Lisa Gilford and Tom Nolan, and presumably an inside counsel with their client Toyota, have all received my answer and proposed revisions to the revisions that they made to my draft settlement proposal. Round and round we go.

Last week on this blog I promised "more definitive news" about this matter this week, but since all the details are coming to me from my lawyers, dang it, for now I cannot disclose them without risking my privilege. That is the nature of this game. Let me say that I have some amazing lawyers.

Anyway, at a very high level, I suppose that I can disclose this negotiation is like a microcosm of the whole issue of Toyota SUA, where there has been a huge but fluctuating public demand for information, and a nearly total blackout of information coming from Toyota. Its marketing secret sauce is just that, its secrets. They make money, but it is poison.

I looked around for some nice-to-hear music for "let it all hang out," but there's nothing fit for this blog. My son Moses is becoming such a Beatles fan that we are listening to that music all the time now, morning and night. I have to beg off when I cannot manage to concentrate on a heavy-duty contract translation with all that "yeah, yeah, yeah" in the background.

How about this, which fits the situation only in part, and it is directed at Lisa, who keeps trying to come in through the bathroom window when the court has shut the front door on what she wants.