"double gotcha" in court ruling

[Wilson Gray]

Well, Dictaphone was, like Packard, once one of the best-known
brand-names in the country, if not the world. My WAG is that "Old
Dictaphone" refers to the original company, for which Mark once
worked, and that "New Dictaphone" is the company that bought the
original company and arrogated to itself the name of the old company,
much as the company that I knew in my childhood, youth, and early
middle age as the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, after becoming
SBC, is now AT&T.

-Wilson

On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "double gotcha" in court ruling
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Is there really a company called "Old Dictaphone"?  Or is that a
> (legal) retronym?  Or just a place-holder for the real name?
>
> lh
>
> At 4:33 PM -0400 8/6/08, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>There's nothing unusual about the expression, but I was surprised and
>>amused to find it in the text of a legal decision. I've put it in "***
>>  ***". The decision is related to the self-destruction of a company
>>that bought the company I used to work for
>>
>>http://www.masslawyersweekly.com/index.cfm/archive/view/id/444306
>>Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly - Corporate - In pari delicto doctrine
>>
>>"[I]t is impossible to ignore the close connection between the wrong
>>in which New Dictaphone was a 'player' (fraudulently inducing Old
>>Dictaphone into a merger) and the wrong that the claim seeks to
>>redress (the failure of Defendants to detect that they were being
>>defrauded). Put another way, the fraudulent player is suing the
>>defrauded controlling shareholders and directors for negligently (or
>>even recklessly) failing to detect the fraud, a ***double gotcha***.
>>According to the Trustee, Defendants repeatedly hamstrung the efforts
>>of the outside entities it hired to perform due diligence by limiting
>>the time and money allotted and ignoring red flags. ... These actions,
>>even if wrongful, pale in comparison to the intentional fraud
>>perpetrated by L&H (and imputed to New Dictaphone), satisfying the
>>first prong of the binary paradigm governing the in pari delicto
>>defense.  ...
>>
>>--
>>Mark Mandel
>>
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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 -Sam'l Clemens

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