Mr Drake is a partner in the Washington office of the elite US law firm Kirkland & Ellis, where he specialises in environmental litigation. He was also one of the small army of lawyers BP (BP.) turned to in fighting the colossal legal fall-out from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Volkswagen (the yellow line in the graph below) is currently in the free-fall stage of its own Deepwater. Governments, states, shareholders, dealerships and groups of car-owners around the world are filing major lawsuits and criminal investigations into the company’s admission that more than 11m of its vehicles may have been fitted with so-called "defeat devices". The company has set aside €6.5bn (£4.8bn) to deal with the matter, but there is no telling the extent of the likely reputational and court-imposed damage.
That was also the case in the days and weeks after Deepwater. As oil gushed from the Macondo well - with the extent of the environmental damage either unknown or played down - BP's shares (the white line below) fell steadily from 655p on 20 April to 565p on 5 May, 430p by 1 June, and 305p just over two months later on 25 June, a total drop of 53 per cent.
Volkswagen's precipitous descent has been steeper and faster. The stock opened at €167 on 18 September, had cratered by a fifth by the following Monday, and now sit at €107, a drop of 35 per cent in just 10 days. With so much bad news likely to follow, new chief executive Matthias Müller faces a gargantuan, near impossible task to prevent a further devaluation of the company. Court cases can take years and are invariably accompanied by bad press. That's unlikely to help consumer confidence, which may well multiply the share price fall so far.
