Discovery is the bread and butter of most big-firm litigators. But the most important and ethically sensitive decisions the make-choosing when and how to avoid disclosing damming evidence to adversaries-are almost always veiled in secrecy. Now an anonymous whistle-blower in a case near Seattle has helped give as a revealing glimpse into how litigators reconcile their duties to be zealous advocates with their duties not to be whores. It’s not a pretty picture and it involves one of Seattle’s largest and most prestigious firms.

The covered-up corporate document that the whistle-blower leaked in March 1990 led to an agreement this January by Seattle’s 200-lawyer Bogle & Gates and its client Fisons Corp. to pay $325000 in sactions for discovery abuse, one of the largest such awards ever. By misleading its adversaries to avoid producing damning documents in its client’s files, Bogle provided a textbox example of the need for discovery reforms even more far-reaching than those that were adopted last year by the federal judiciary-reforms that are still under attack in Congress. (On which more below.)

What prompted the settlement was a unanimous Washington Supreme Court decision last September 16, and the prospect of an evidentiary hearing on remand that would have made Bogle’s conduct look even worse than it looks in the court’s sternly worded opinion.

The seven justices held that Bogle & Gates and its client, a British-owned pharmaceutical company with U.S. headquarters near Rochester, had used "misleading" discovery responses to hide two I "smoking gun documents" from lawyers for a 3-year-old girl who suffered permanent brain damage as a result of taking a i Fisons asthma drug in 1986, as well as from lawyers for the girl’s pediatrician, who had filed a cross-claim against Fisons.