Are Foreign Lost Profits Really Lost? Supreme Court Agrees to Review the Extraterritorial Scope of Patent Damages in WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp.

The amount of litigation regarding environmental and climate change issues is, perhaps unsurprisingly, growing worldwide.[1] A significant portion of that litigation relates to so-called ‘greenwashing’, ‘climate-washing’ or ‘social-washing’ disputes. In other words, legal cases where people or organisations (often NGOs and consumer groups) accuse companies, banks, financial institutions or others, of making untrue statements. They argue these companies or financial institutions are pretending their products, services or operations are more environmentally-friendly, sustainable, or ethically ‘good’ for society – than is really the case. Perhaps more interestingly, of all the litigation in the environmental and climate change space – complainants bringing greenwashing and social washing cases have, according to some of these reports, statistically the most chance of winning. So, in a nutshell, not only is greenwashing and social washing litigation on the rise, companies and financial institutions are most likely to lose cases in this area....