Roscoe has struck a series of groundbreaking agreements that both sides can at least work on, adding new tension to the negotiations, according to people familiar with the matter. and recently brokered another case where their firm was on the other side.
The judge, who was personally urging the parties to find a way to settlement, took as much time as he could. He was visibly impatient when the jury finished eating a wrap and salad platter from nearby Cavanaugh’s.
Last weekend, Lachlan Murdoch allowed his team to increase the amount the company pays in an attempt to find a path to a deal. And during negotiations, as Fox’s offers increased, Dominion softened its final conclusion on admitting wrongdoing. Acknowledgment from Fox that it understood Judge Davis’ pretrial judgment against the network, including that it was
The resulting Fox statement was the fruit of a careful defense effort, saying it “acknowledges the court’s ruling that found certain claims about Dominion to be false,” which many of the network’s critics wanted. But it also gave Dominion lawyers the freedom to immediately announce the eye-popping sum they had won, $787.5 million, a message in itself. Once, Dominion attorney Stephen Shackelford told reporters outside the courthouse shortly after the trial’s abrupt end: “Money is accountability.”
The closing of the deal was surprising and unexpected. Neither side has seriously committed to a settlement since Dominion filed the lawsuit more than two years before him. The Dominion and his lawyers case strengthaugmented by emails, texts, and depositions revealing that many inside Fox were concerned that the propaganda of the conspiracy theory about the Dominion Machine was false.
And Mr. Ding, who heads Fox’s legal strategy, had advised the Murdochs that the case was viable — a judge’s pretrial ruling against Fox News and its parent company was more difficult than expected. Even as it showed, Fox continued to insist that they could win on appeal…the road for them in Delaware. Ding told his colleagues he believes the Supreme Court may find the case compelling and even take it up under the First Amendment.
But as Zoom’s hearings and court proceedings dragged on, Fox’s legal strategy repeatedly stalled and was tripped up by a series of miscalculations, bad breaks and missed opportunities for reconciliation.
