Billions at stake for BP as Gulf oil spill trial opens

Nearly three years after a deadly rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico triggered the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, a federal judge in New Orleans is presiding over a high-stakes trial for the raft of litigation spawned by the disaster. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier will hear several hours of opening statements today by lawyers for the companies involved in the 2010 spill and the plaintiffs who have sued them. And the judge, not a jury, ultimately could decide how much more money BP and its partners on the ill-fated drilling project owe for their roles in the environmental catastrophe. BP has said it already has racked up more than $24 billion in spill-related expenses and has estimated it will pay a total of $42 billion to fully resolve its liability for the disaster that killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of oil. But the trial attorneys for the federal government and Gulf Coast states and private plaintiffs hope to convince the judge that the company is liable for much more. With billions of dollars on the line, the companies and their courtroom adversaries have spared no expense in preparing for a trial that could last several months. Hundreds of attorneys have worked on the case, generating roughly 90 million pages of documents, logging nearly 9,000 docket entries and taking more than 300 depositions of witnesses who could testify at trial. More details can be found in the full story here.