Summary
It was one of the fastest civil settlements in the history of corporate malfeasance, coming together in six months instead of the years usually required for such complex negotiations. But the path to Volkswagen’s $15 billion deal last month with American officials and car owners over the company’s diesel deception was fraught with pitfalls, including clashing egos and cultures, arguments over mathematical formulas and frayed nerves from late nights and lost weekends.
The negotiations, which began in January, threatened to unravel in March. Fixing half a million cars to comply with clean air rules looked increasingly impossible. And Volkswagen was balking at any plan to buy back and scrap every car, which the company said it believed would be exorbitantly expensive.
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“From the beginning, if you compared it to a horse race, the winning horse was already some ways down the track,” said Deborah R. Hensler, an expert on complex litigation and class actions at Stanford Law School. “It’s extremely rare for there to be this scale of litigation against a defendant who at the beginning of the litigation has already admitted liability.”
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